Paper Doll

by Jim Shepard

  In the dark, vague shapes telescoped toward and away from him. He followed elusive ribbon-like creatures he hoped were temporary retinal imperfections of some sort until he had to get up, and hissing in frustration he lowered his feet to the floor and padded back to the latrine, concentrating dimly on some notion of a drink of water.

  Snowberry was asleep, still seated upright, swaying with tiny starts like a doddering grandfather. Bryant sat beside him and when he didn’t wake extended a finger slowly and touched his nose. He didn’t stir. He waggled his fingers grimly before Snowberry’s face. His journal was opened on his lap. Bryant picked it up and began reading without high hopes. He skipped a section on Frances Langford. The next sections were drafts of letters.

  This whole thing has really been something in terms of showing me the world and how different everyone is. Before the service I’d never met anyone from other places and now I know guys from Rhode Island and Ohio, and I’ve met guys from Texas and New Mexico and places like that. I always think about what Dad used to say about people from upstate and stuff, and I wonder what he would’ve thought about this crowd.

  I eat good. The chow here is really good for the most part though everybody gripes about it all the time. I guess it’s something you’re supposed to do in the service. You can’t believe how important food is here. If Mom knew she certainly wouldn’t worry on that score. Guys’ll sit around and just talk about eating and never change the subject. Guys are always talking about how their mother made this or that, and everyone listens like their lives depend on it. Sebastian Piacenti, one of our waist gunners I told you about, has this knack for talking about his mother’s cooking so that the guys can almost smell it. He went on the other day in the jeeps after a mission about this veal dish with tomatoes that had the guys moaning and biting their hands.

  Snowberry then attempted, with limited success, Bryant judged, to recapture some of Piacenti’s magic. He skipped ahead.

  The guy who wrote to ask for the picture of Sis is Harold Bean. He’s got a girl here but I guess things aren’t going so well between them, and I was really talking Sis up in front of him one day, so I guess he was sold. He’s a nice guy, I think, though Lewis rides him pretty hard. Lewis says Bean raises a crew’s buggeration factor—that’s the phrase we got from the Brits for chances of something going wrong—but I think he’s just pretty much like the rest of us. Maybe more so. We don’t want to let each other down, and I think we do a pretty good job.

  Lewis thinks Bean’s getting jumpy and says you mark his words, he’ll end up in a flak home, but I think it’s more this thing with the girl, and the rotten luck the squadron’s been having. I worry more about Piacenti. I don’t know that much more about Bean. He’s from Pennsylvania, but I think he told you that. He’s a good-hearted guy. He’s not a wolf. I think he looks fine but Lewis likes to say he’s got a face like an unmade bed. I think he looks like the little guy in Lost Horizons. You know the one I mean?

  I’m okay. I think we’re all pretty blue like I said right now. I’ve heard some great new stuff from Der Bingle on the Armed Forces Network, and some new Vera Lynn stuff on the English stations. Tell Sis I’ve been working on the harmonies.

  I find myself daydreaming more than I used to, and I have to watch it, or the guys’ll think I’m ready for the flak farm, too. I have these other dreams, too, though I don’t think they’re going to last forever. The guys call dreaming like that pulling a lot of night missions. I have this one where there are German fighters all around us and my turret mechanism is like it has sand in it or something, and the gun controls are all floppy and loose. It gets me in a real sweat.

  It seems like what we were taught and everything isn’t good enough to handle everything

  The entry stopped. Bryant closed the book and woke Snowberry, getting him to his feet and leading him gently to his bunk, as if putting to bed a sleepy child on Christmas Eve.

  It seemed to them that it had been decided to keep them flying missions until they were dead. They were informed at the morning briefing that the target of the day would be Kassel, and a lieutenant known to most of them as a good man and a steady co-pilot stood up and said with frightening calm that he was no longer willing to fly these goddamn things, and that he wanted out. When he refused to sit down, he was escorted from the room.

  On the hardstand Hirsch and Gabriel alone seemed capable of smooth movement, the rest of the crew drooped and jerked like marionettes waiting for their turn to board. Bean was learning German phrases from the little sheet in his escape kit: Danke, Bitte. Zug. Schnellzug. Dritte Klasse.

  Snowberry was white. “I’m not gonna make it,” he whispered to Bryant. “We were so cocky before. Why were we so cocky before?”

  Bryant understood, he thought: It was as if the present situation represented an invited retribution.

  “This paper pusher I met in London told me, ‘You want to make breakfast, you gotta break some eggs,’” Lewis said. He was blowing on his gloves to further dry them out.

  “That’s what they tell the eggs,” Willis Eddy said from within the plane.

  Lewis shook his head with the expression of a man with insects on his face. “I clocked him. I got these little marks on my knuckles from his teeth. I hope he gums Farina the rest of his life.”

  They were thirteenth off the runway, climbing into the lightening sky behind the banking silhouettes of the 17’s just ahead of them, and they rose east to the assembly points toward the brighter air. The contrails of the highest aircraft stood out in dark relief.

  They flew to Kassel without the usual talk, the periodic oxygen checks the only communication. Most of the way, they had an escort of P-47’s with their reassuringly fat milk bottle fuselages, and the leading and trailing elements of the formation far from them attracted the German interceptors once the escorts had sheered off for lack of fuel.

  Piacenti called fighters coming up from nine o’clock low and Bryant swung the turret around to catch a glimpse of four Messerschmitts with bright yellow noses pulling up close to one another and breaking formation at Paper Doll’s altitude, at the break curling back like the petals of a flower. They swooped out of range after some of the lower squadrons and stragglers.

  He spun the turret to follow the action above and ahead and his vision shimmered, as though he had slugged a beer too quickly on a hot day. The diaphragm of his mask felt dank and cold. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and he could hear Eddy’s voice calling for steady but it wavered in volume. With concentration and detachment he seemed to understand what might have been happening, remembered a briefing: the A8B masks are prone to ice buildup in the exhalation bags, which unchecked leads to ice in the tube between the bag and diaphragm. He noticed below the fires of downed aircraft and bomb bursts as red peculiar blossoms, and moved to get a grip on his mask but felt like someone chest-deep in muck. Before his eyes colored electric bulbs blinked as sapphire, emerald, and ruby, and he felt his mind becoming luminous with dream; felt, like a drowsy child, ready to accept what needed accepting. He saw his drunk grandmother wandering around in his backyard dazed, impossibly holding a fifty-caliber Browning. With a sturdy and optimistic lack of resistance he slumped from the slung bicycle seat and tore the leg of his suit falling from the turret. He was dimly aware of the iron-cold slipstream blast on his calf. He remembered the creamy blandness of his mother’s egg salad, and was surprised to find his leg so tender, so sensitive.

  He awoke to find Eddy and Bean working over him, transferring the portable oxygen bottles onto his mask, and he realized he was breathing through someone else’s as they did it. They were on their way home, Bean shouted to him. He nodded and waved. He had urinated in his suit and his thighs and rear were cold. The fuselage floor seemed to have the mealiness of wet sand, though he registered that was impossible.

  He rode a long while with a kind of animal speechlessness. His mask again iced up and for a stretch Bean sat beside him and worked the only functioning mask on the buddy
system, the two of them slumped together in their heavy flight suits as dull as drugged birds. He remembered frostbite and made an effort to move his fingers and toes. He had the weird sense the plane was no longer moving. He tried to keep awake but could not, and curled his toes within his boots as a last measure before passing out.

  He was shuttled immediately to the station sick quarters and surrounded by frostbite cases. The sick quarters were four Nissen huts joined by enclosed hallways, discreetly removed by an aspen grove and a hillock from the barracks. He slept for sixteen hours and then sat up and gazed around him. The frostbite cases sat quietly, holding their affected areas like delicate and broken instruments. Their hands and feet changed as they watched absorbedly with apprehension edging on horror, from white and numb to red and swollen to something verging on black. A navigator a few bunks over lay as if dead with his head bandaged completely from the nose up. He’d been there three days and the men called him Claude Rains. Flak had blown out the perspex nose and his goggles had been smashed, Bryant’s neighbor told him. “The Doc said his eyes were frozen. Imagine?” The navigator was inert. A boy near the door was shaking uncontrollably. He had a blond cowlick that stuttered and waved like a signaling device.

  Bryant was treated for anoxia and mild frostbite, his rear end alternately chilled and burning. It was still white but heading toward pink, his neighbor informed him with an air of certainty. It still burned enough to frighten Bryant, though as far as anyone could tell it was not swelling but recovering. The doctors credited some blankets Bean had stuffed under him.

  He was released for dinner and found himself unwilling or unable to talk much with Snowberry or Lewis about what had happened. Lewis had been particularly interested since anoxia was his private phobia, but Bryant was less than specific about whatever early indications he might have noticed, and Lewis clearly decided to pursue the matter later. Bryant found Bean and Eddy and thanked them, but they looked away shyly and protested with shrugs that they found the thanks unnecessary and embarrassing.

  He fell asleep quickly after dark and dreamed of swordlike night searchlights picking up a series of placidly floating barrage balloons. There was a wing from the biplane crash he’d witnessed as a child fluttering down like an enormous seed pod and swooping like a pendulum, and he was back in a nature camp he’d attended when he was eight, gazing at a sullen copperhead in a dismal cage.

  He was led through a lean-to that molted into a kind of drainage tunnel, and became aware in the darkness ahead of an immense spider with a balloon-like abdomen and a palisade of curled black legs spiky with hairs that were distinct in the gloom. He was on his back and his breath came with his kicking and thrashing and the spider’s legs every so often palpated his with a terrible firm gentleness.

  He woke to the sound of B-17’s returning from their assembly points, a long mission necessitating a pre-dawn start evidently having been scrubbed. There were noises and shiftings from most of the bunks. The planes were coming in at half-minute intervals and the lights reached and spanned, wavering through the windows and across the barracks, illuminating those who were awake and those who were asleep.

  He got up, his mouth sour and dry. On his way to the latrine he stopped, and could make out in the darkness a boy in his underwear hunting for something in his barracks bag. When the lights crossed his face there was a look of pure apprehension, as if no activity could have been more illicit. Another boy near the door was chewing the corner of his sheet.

  In the latrine he found a filmy glass and filled it and drank. The water was cold and when he looked at it, it was laced with blood, like colored smoke or underwater vegetation. In the mirror he could see that his gums were bleeding. The event seemed inexplicable. His teeth were reddening and he held the glass aloft as if he were offering a toast at a cannibal feast.

  He retrieved his blanket from his bunk and stood outside, wrapped like an old Indian, bare feet cold on the dirt. Someone else was up as well, smoking just beyond the corner of the hut, but he didn’t care to find out who. He appreciated the blanket’s warmth and forgave its roughness and understood that his urges were being narrowed toward the primal: Safety. Food. Sleep. Farther behind, Robin or Lois. He stood in the damp early darkness waiting, the great colored chains of lights floating in. Below them the vermilion lights of the runway markers gleamed and receded. Behind him in the barracks he could hear as a background murmur the small shrieks and gabblings of battle dreams. Somebody in another hut altogether was playing a pitchpipe in sad and unrelated keys.

  He walked a little further and climbed atop the hood of a fuel bowser. There were dull yellow lights on over the picket post, shuttered in a halfhearted blackout. He could make out ragged and gaunt dogs moving as shadows in and out of the illumination, starving, he knew, unsupported by base personnel, waiting for death. One nosed the ground and looked over at him, its tiny pink tongue in the distance visible in the light.

  The beams ranging from the towers seemed to be pulling the big ships out of the night, and they dropped and banged like clumsy and lost buses onto the tarmac and swept past him, the turrets gleaming and illuminating shadows within, and then they were gone.

  Part Three

  Schweinfurt

  On one of his fathers hunting trips they had walked and walked through a damp November drizzle, their trail erratic with minor mudslides and gravel, in search of game, without success; Bryant had limped behind nursing a blister, his legs all the way to his calves slick with black mud from falls. They had seen absolutely nothing. His father after the first few fruitless hours had taken to slogging along as if on a forced march, his head lowered. They had stopped for lunch to discover that the rain had ruined the sandwiches Bryant had ineptly wrapped, and his father had swallowed that as well. While Bryant had attempted near-complete unobtrusiveness, his father had set his .22 stock-down against a forked birch to leave the trail a few feet to relieve himself. Hitting full stream he flushed a huge buck pheasant, which exploded up right before them, and his father’s urine stream had looped and written on the air while he’d tried to do everything at once with a hand on his zipper and a hand scrabbling for his gun, and had only succeeded in spraying himself and tipping the .22, which went off in Bryant’s general direction. His father ended up on the seat of his pants looking at his hands, his open zipper like a little laughing mouth and the pheasant long gone, a distant flapping among the trees. Bryant hadn’t helped him up and hadn’t mentioned the waspish sound of the bullet. He had been wise enough, in fact, not to say anything the whole march home.

  With a craftsman’s care he produced a series of sweat impressions with his palm on the pages of the field manual for the Sperry turret. The moisture made the paper curl.

  The summer heat made the great mounded hangars waver like hills in the humid distance. Armorers bandoliered like Mexican bandits with cartridge belts humped their loads across hardstands too hot for England.

  Word was Lewis had talked to a guy whose job it was to fill out the Statements of Effects forms for lost or missing airmen. Lewis had caught this guy in one of the huts going through somebody’s stuff. The stuff had turned out to belong to a waist gunner from Boom Town named Gus Fleener, who had had his left arm taken off by flak over Kassel. They hadn’t been able to apply a tourniquet because how do you tourniquet a shoulder? So his crew buddies had made the decision to bail him out and rely on local hospitality to get him to a German hospital in time. He’d gone into shock, though, and pulled his own ripcord, there in the plane, and they’d had to bunch up the chute under his remaining arm and throw him out so it didn’t catch on the tail. The belly gunner and tail had reported seeing the chute open but no one was overly optimistic. The wound did not allow for much delay. And they knew enough about the lamentable spread in their bombing patterns to assume what the CO termed “ill will” on the part of the German inhabitants of the countryside. They’d heard stories of hapless chutists being pitchforked, or run down with hoes and sickles.

&nb
sp; So this guy went through all of poor Fleener’s personal property, the crews heard, making out a list, while Lewis watched: socks, 4 ea., letters, 8 ea., combs, 2 ea., photos, 2 ea. Final disposition of this stuff, the guy confided to Lewis, was a touchy bit of work: some poor schmoe’s widow, he said, the last things she needs to see are some of these French postcards, or love letters with the wrong names on them. Air Corps policy was to remove the property in question as soon as possible once the airman was known to be missing or lost, so his buddies wouldn’t brood any longer than necessary on the loss. The result was the approximate opposite of what was intended. The Statement of Effects man told Lewis wistfully that he didn’t make a lot of friends.

  Morale dropped as the story circulated. Snowberry at one point mused in Bryant’s presence, “Ever notice how morale here keeps going down without ever going up?” Someone posted in the ready room a list headed with the title What Won’t Work, and filled with items all the way from “Honey, You Know You’re the Only One for Me” to Prayer. Saluting was becoming more overtly a way of saying Fuck You to those who demanded it; the practice had often been considered “chickenshit” by the men in the first place, generally ignored except for the CO, the visiting brass, and formal occasions.

  It was no longer uncommon, after missions, to find Norden bombsights, so obsessively protected in training in the States as the secret weapon the Axis would give Italy for, lying in the grass unattended near the hardstands like mysterious, useless gizmos cleared from the attic. Men were becoming geniuses at hoarding small slights. Unpleasant jobs and missions mornings produced a variety of obscure ailments, which debilitated no one and enriched everyone’s rotten humor. Everyone had a different method of following what was perceived to be an emerging pattern of sinister design, based on irrefutable omens. Half of three squadrons developed diarrhea.