At dawn the colonel ordered them to break for the American lines.
Screams woke Jamie. A man near him was bayoneted where he lay, but Jamie was overlooked. He struggled from his sleeping bag, ran uphill with his rifle, away from the chaos. Grenades sent up sprays of earth. He half fell into a foxhole already occupied by the body of a long-dead Japanese soldier.
Three Japanese, not far away, cut the guy lines of the medical tent. The canvas fell, draped over thrashing bodies on cots. The soldiers started bayoneting. Later Jamie would remember the tormented dog from so long ago, under the blanket, but he thought of nothing as he brought up his rifle and took aim. The first one he got in the back of the head. The man’s body jerked forward as though yanked by a rip cord. The second he caught in the shoulder, spinning him down into a crouch. While he was kneeling, one hand over the wound, Jamie hit him in the chest. The third man was looking around, confused. Jamie saw that his only weapon was a bayonet tied to a stick, and he dropped this, stood there gazing at the mountains until Jamie’s next shot pierced his forehead.
Jamie set aside his rifle. He took a small notebook and a pencil from his chest pocket. His hand shook badly.
After a time, the Japanese seemed to lose their sense of purpose and moved in short erratic bursts, like minnows, brandishing weapons at nothing. A few ate rations taken from the dead, wolfing down chocolate bars. They passed around packs of cigarettes, lit up. From uphill came the sounds of continued battle, but the men on the valley floor stood in casual clumps as though at a party. They took grenades from their belts, tapped them against their helmets to start the fuses, held them under their chins or against their stomachs. Quick blasts of gore. Smoke like a magician’s screen, revealing, as it dissipated, that bodies recently whole and alive made headless and handless or scooped out at the middle.
In the foxhole, Jamie drew and drew, would only realize later that he had covered pages with garbled scribbles and blotches out of which no sense could be made.
Ratcliffe Hall, Leicestershire, England
March 1943
Two months before the Battle of Attu
One long. Two long. One short, two long.
T. M. W.
Tomorrow.
Marian, in bed, imagined Ruth in her identical bed on the other side of the wall, one finger tapping. Tomorrow…Lndn…dinnr w Ed…pls? Want u to…
No more tapping. Had Ruth fallen asleep? Or forgotten her Morse? Marian pressed her palm against the cold plaster, waited. Finally she tapped with her index finger.
To w?
A reply: To knw hm.
In January, when Marian had arrived at Ratcliffe Hall, she had learned it was called a “great house,” not a mansion or a palace. There was one other woman pilot billeted there, an English girl, and three men, two of whom were American, but Marian, daunted by the grand surroundings and the rapid chatter of the others, kept to herself. She was given one of several rooms over the garage, all of which had the luxuries of radiators and hot water. There were tennis courts and what she learned were squash courts. There was a butler who cleaned the pilots’ boots, and dinner was served in a wood-paneled dining room, accompanied with wine and ale. Occasionally, illustrious friends of their host, Sir Lindsay Everard, appeared at the table without warning.
Sir Lindsay was heir to a brewing fortune and owned a nearby aerodrome he’d given over to the ATA. He was not a pilot himself but an enthusiast, a collector of pilots and airplanes, who seemed delighted the war had brought so many of each to his doorstep.
The aerodrome was crowded with a shifting assortment of most everything the RAF flew, though Marian, not yet qualified to fly all the types, mostly flew taxi planes and cleared Spitfires churned out by the factory at Castle Bromwich. Less frequently, she picked up Oxfords from Ansty and Defiants from Wolverhampton and flew to and from maintenance units in the Cotswolds.
Or at least she did these things in theory, as the dense industrial haze that hung over the midlands grounded the pilots many—perhaps most—mornings. Sometimes three whole days might pass when they couldn’t fly, even as increasingly urgent messages came from Castle Bromwich about all the shiny new Spits piling up. On the days Marian flew deliveries, if she finished before dark a taxi plane might bring her back to Ratcliffe, or she might return via train, or she might have to find lodgings wherever she was, which was not always easy or even possible. It wasn’t rare for her to find herself lugging her overnight bag and parachute through closed-up unfamiliar little towns, looking for a place to sleep.
* * *
—
One February night, grimy from delivering a Spit to Brize Norton and another from there to Cosford, Marian returned to Ratcliffe and noticed the door to the next room standing open. She peeked in. A woman leaned over a partially unpacked suitcase. Marian stopped, elation surging up before she could tamp it down. “Ruth!” she said.
Ruth straightened, coolly unsmiling, a dress in her hand. “They said you were in the next room. I asked if there was anywhere else, but there isn’t. You’ll have to blame the ATA.” She’d asked for Hamble, not Ratcliffe, she said. She was taking the place of the English girl, who’d gone to upgrade to twin-engines. “Don’t worry. I won’t get underfoot.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Marian said helplessly. She hadn’t been aware of being unhappy, but her burst of joy at seeing Ruth felt like a relief, an antidote.
“I don’t know what to say to that,” Ruth said, hanging the dress in her wardrobe with a clatter. “You dropped me completely.”
“I’m sorry—I really am.”
“Are you? Being sorry’s all well and good, but I think you owe me an explanation.”
Marian hesitated. She couldn’t tell Ruth the truth, but she didn’t want to lie. “Could you trust me enough to forgive me even if I don’t explain? You’re right I’ve behaved badly. There’s a reason, but could you trust that it doesn’t matter?”
Again Ruth looked her over, gauging her sincerity. “We’ll see.”
They were awkward for a few days, but then they were as they’d been in the beginning, better even, more grateful for each other. Ruth had been lonely, too, she said.
The Ratcliffe dinner table was dramatically enlivened by Ruth’s presence. She dove headlong into the conversation, and when, a week into her residency, ski planes came up (Marian suspected Ruth had somehow steered the conversation toward them), she said, “Marian, tell them about taking off from the mudflats.”
And what could Marian do but describe herself rocking from side to side in her old Bellanca, trying to unstick the skis from the stinking muck at Valdez.
“Why did you have the skis on at all if there was no snow?” Sir Lindsay wanted to know.
She explained about bringing supplies to the high mines, landing on glaciers even in the summer, and Sir Lindsay’s interest was so apparent, his questions so probing, leading her inexorably from one anecdote to the next, that she scarcely noticed she was behaving almost as a raconteur, holding the whole table rapt. Though, when she finally hit a patch of astonished silence after describing a williwaw blowing her off a glacier, she clammed up, embarrassed, sawed fixedly at her meat.
Sir Lindsay turned to Ruth. “You’ve unlocked our sphinx,” he said. “Well done.”
* * *
—
Marian had been avoiding meeting Eddie, had ducked other invitations from Ruth but never a direct plea until the Morse code message came through the wall. Until then, if Ruth said Eddie would be in London, Marian would beg off, ride her motorbike alone to Leicester or Nottingham or elsewhere. If Ruth said Eddie couldn’t get away, Marian would go into town with her, and they would stay at the Red Cross Club, and all would be as it had been. Dinners, movies and plays, cocktails, dancing.
But Marian couldn’t refuse. Bomber crews didn’t have much in the way of life expectancy.
&nb
sp; She lifted her finger, tapped OK.
Eddie met them at the Savoy. Marian gave his hand a firm shake, looked him in the eye. He was very tall and had a long rectangular head like a cart horse’s and warm eyes under heavy brows. Though his teeth were long and a little crowded, he showed them unreservedly when he smiled. “I’ve been wanting to be friends with you for a long time,” he said. “Ruth doesn’t usually rave about people.”
“You’ll give her a swollen head,” Ruth said, leaning on his arm.
“Before the war,” Eddie said as he steered them to the American Bar, “I never would have dared come into this hotel because I would have been worried about looking like a hayseed, but the way I see it, if I can fly over Germany, I can drink anywhere I want.” He indicated his olive jacket, his silver navigator’s wings. “It helps not having to worry about what to wear.”
Marian nodded. Her own blue uniform felt like armor, too, like a universal explanation.
Ruth poked her in the back. “You’ll have to talk tonight, Marian, or Eddie will think I’ve been telling tall tales.”
“I know what you mean,” Marian said to Eddie, thinking of Jackie scolding her for wearing flying clothes to her interview. “It’s a relief to be above reproach.”
“Above reproach!” Eddie said. “That’s exactly it. You know, I almost don’t want to admit how much I’ve been enjoying London. The mood is exuberant, isn’t it? I want to say careening. Do you know what I mean? I guess when people are being reminded all the time they might die—they will die—they make more of an effort to be alive. Don’t you think?”
They ordered cocktails, and Eddie told a story about his ball turret gunner falling asleep as they approached a target, curled in his steel and Plexiglas bubble under the B-17’s belly. “I don’t know how you sleep like that, dangling in the sky, but this guy can sleep anywhere. He’s famous for it.”
“Marian can sleep anywhere, too,” said Ruth.
Eddie raised an eyebrow. “That so? What’s your secret? I’m a terrible sleeper.”
“Keep going with the story,” Marian said.
“Well, we didn’t know he was asleep, only that he was being real quiet. He said he didn’t wake up until the flak was really going, and then he”—Eddie mimicked someone lurching and blinking awake—“swiveled around and immediately, immediately, shot down a Messerschmitt. We got back in one piece—one slightly perforated piece—and he said he’d been having a dream about shooting down an airplane, and as soon as he woke up, it came true.” He leaned forward, amused, looking between Marian and Ruth. “Isn’t that strange? I’ll tell you, we all thought hard about what we wanted to dream about before we went to sleep that night in case it was contagious—dreams coming true.”
“I hope you dreamed about waking up at an air base in England,” Ruth said.
Charming. That was the word for him. Marian had met so few charming people, at least not whose charm was of Eddie’s easy, generous, affable variety. She could see, watching Ruth watch Eddie, that she loved him.
“Marian could fall asleep in a ball turret if she wanted to,” Ruth said.
Eddie asked, “Where’s the most unlikely place you’ve ever slept, Marian?”
Marian looked at Ruth, who waited expectantly, wanting her to impress, to dazzle. She felt defeated already. She could never compete with Eddie’s charm. Still, she resolved not to be dull.
“Once,” she said, “in Alaska, I crashed a plane into a river, deep enough that there was water in the cockpit. There was no chance of help until the next morning, so I slept on top of the plane.” She hunched her shoulders, losing momentum. “It was summer. It wasn’t too bad, except for the mosquitoes.”
“Tell him about the bear,” Ruth said.
“A bear came by,” Marian said miserably. “Fishing.”
“A grizzly bear,” said Ruth.
“Were you always brave?” Eddie said. “What were you like as a child?”
Marian thought. “Naïve,” she said. “Boyish. Obsessive.”
Eddie smiled broadly.
* * *
—
They went to dinner at a Greek restaurant. “There’s something shocking about the scale,” Eddie said about Greenland, over which he’d navigated a brand-new B-17 when he came from the States. “All you can see is ice. White to the horizon. My maps might as well have been empty pages.”
Marian was run through by deep envy. She envied him Ruth, and she envied him Greenland. She remembered the etchings of icebergs and whaling ships in her father’s books.
“Once,” she said, “I flew north from Barrow, at the very top of Alaska, out over the pack ice. I almost couldn’t make myself turn back. There was something…” She trailed off. She didn’t know what she wanted to say.
“Mesmerizing,” he said. “I found the blankness mesmerizing.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what it was.”
“Marian always pushes too far,” said Ruth. “She can’t help herself. Anyway, all that ice sounds awful to me. There aren’t even any people there.”
“There are some around the edges,” Eddie said. “Must be hardy folk.”
“No people is part of the appeal,” said Marian.
Eddie lifted his glass. “To no people.”
Leaving the restaurant, they plunged into the blackout as though dropping into an underwater cave. Piccadilly deprived the eye but crowded the other senses. Bodies pushed from all around. Soldiers and women hooted and laughed, wheeling past like bats.
To Marian, tethered to Ruth by the hand, the noise and movement and hilarity seemed like another form of stillness, of waiting. They were all waiting. For the liquor to kick in. For a kiss or a touch. For dawn. For sleep. For duty to resume. For the war to go on, to end, if it ever would. For what would happen to happen.
Eddie steered them through a door and a dark velvet membrane of blackout curtains into a humid bubble of life. Massed uniforms shifted and bobbed on a dance floor like a raft of kelp on a swell, dappled with colored lights. Under the smoke the air had a sweet-and-sour funk, like the people themselves were fermenting. Onstage, horns glinted, violins dipped and parried, a singer knit his brow and clutched the microphone as though the song were being dragged out of him by an unseen claw. They went up to the balcony. Eddie was describing the view from his navigator’s desk, out a bomber’s Plexiglas nose. “Sometimes it’s like a rose window in a cathedral,” he shouted over the band as they slid into a banquette, “and sometimes it’s a portal into hell.”
A roundel of sky and cloud, puffs of flak bursting from nothing, like black popcorn. Hundreds of bombers in formation, planes transforming into masses of smoke and flames. Sometimes one would fall, burning, onto another. It got so cold in the planes their skin stuck to the instruments. They wore so many layers of clothes and gear they were big as boulders. Water passed below, thin beaches or marshy coast, then the geometry of human life: fields, roads, roofs. Onto these things they dropped bombs. There were real eggs for breakfast rather than powdered ones on days they flew.
Ruth, between them on the curved banquette, lolled against Marian’s shoulder. Why, Marian wondered, did Ruth not lean against Eddie instead? A few times on winter days she had gone with Caleb and Jamie to the hot springs near Missoula, and the sensation of being submerged in warmth while her cheeks burned with cold and her eyes teared from wind was not unlike how she felt now, most of her basking in the pleasure of Ruth’s closeness while her extremities remained exposed to Eddie’s frigid band of sky.
“Enough,” Eddie said, interrupting himself. “Marian, I’ve been wondering—how’d you get it in your head to fly?”
“I just wanted to. That’s how it is for most everyone, isn’t it?”
“There must have been something.”
“The barnstormers,” Ruth prodded her.
“Yes,” she
said, reluctant, “I did meet some barnstormers when I was a kid.”
“The same day Lindbergh flew the Atlantic,” Ruth said. “Destiny.” She signaled a waitress for another round.
“Then what?” Eddie said.
Ordinarily this was a question Marian would dodge. The facts of her life seemed too strange to tell, too steeped in shame and consequence, and she wasn’t sure she could adequately explain herself. But for once she didn’t want to retreat or evade. In the midst of a war, her secrets were inconsequential.
She said, “Even as a kid, I knew I needed to make money to be a pilot, so I cut my hair off and dressed as a boy so I’d get hired to do odd jobs.”
“Were people fooled?”
“Some were. Some people never look closely at all, at anything. And I think some preferred not to look too closely. Also, it wasn’t so unusual in Montana for people to live on the fringes.”
She told them about collecting bottles, about driving for Mr. Stanley, about Wallace and his drinking and gambling. “Then a man came along who offered to pay for flying lessons.”
Eddie looked puzzled. “Why?”
“It turned out, he wanted to marry me.”
“How’d you get out of that one?” asked Ruth.
Marian forced herself to meet Ruth’s eye. “I didn’t. I married him. Eventually.”
“You married him?” Ruth said, drawing back, outraged and transfixed. “You told me you’d never even gotten close to marrying anyone.”
“I lied,” Marian said. “I don’t talk about him. He wasn’t a very nice man.” She watched the dancers below. She and Barclay had only danced once, on the crossing to England for their honeymoon. In general he had disdained dancing, but the night the storm abated, he’d led her to the ballroom after dinner. The floor had risen and fallen under their feet with the swell, like someone breathing. “He’s dead now, anyway,” she said.
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