B for Buster

by Iain Lawrence

  “You’ll never have a finer friend than Percy,” said Bert. “You know ’e ’as the eye-sign, sir?”

  “Does he?” I said. I didn’t know what the eye-sign was, but I thought I should sound impressed.

  Bert brought the lantern and crouched beside us. “Just look at ’is eyes there, sir. See ’ow they shine? See ’ow ’e’s got a ’alo inside ’im, sir?”

  The light from the lantern flashed across Percy’s face. “Look close, sir.”

  I had never peered into a pigeon’s eyes, or into the eyes of any bird. But Percy turned his head aside, as though to give me a better look, and I saw a beautiful walnut-colored ball with a black pupil gaping in the middle. And all around the black was a pinwheel of gold, bright as sparks. It was just like a halo.

  “That’s the eye-sign, sir,” whispered Bert.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “Oh, ’ardly, sir. That’s the mark of a great pigeon. A truly great pigeon, sir.” He raised the lantern higher, and it lit his own face as well, in a glow that made him look saintly. “A bird with the eye-sign will find its way ’ome no matter what. Nothing can ever stop it.”

  The light glistened on Percy’s feathers; it filled his eye with liquid gold.

  “Percy’s father was bred for racing. His grandpa, too, and don’t he take after them both?” said Bert. “A thousand miles would be nothing to ’im. Rain or snow, ’e wouldn’t mind. There’s not a single thing in ’eaven or earth that would ever keep Percy from coming ’ome.”

  “Does he ever fly in the kites?” I asked.

  “No, sir.” Bert pulled the lantern back and put it down, and the shadows drew around him. “I can’t risk losing ’im, sir. Not on ops. Percy’s a breeder, sir.”

  “But he’s got no mate,” I said.

  “I’m waiting for the proper girl to come along,” said Bert. “For a girl with the eye-sign, see?” His voice fell to a whisper. “I’m thinking maybe it’s going to be one of those babies, sir.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. Then he touched his nose. “But mum’s the word, sir.”

  I got up from the feed bags and brushed at my clothes. There were pigeon droppings round my ankles and my heels, and I felt disgusted at first to see them. But then I smiled at the thought that I was perhaps becoming a little bit like Bert. It made me think of someone stripping off Batman’s cape and finding underneath not Bruce Wayne, the millionaire, but just a lowly servant.

  The sky grew light as I worked with Bert. He told me stories of the pigeons, and of their parents and their grandparents, tales the breeders had passed along. He made me look at Gilbert, and told me how an ancestor of that chubby little bird had saved the lives of a regiment in the Great War. “The men were pinned down,” he said. “The Germans were shelling them ’ard. They sent a pigeon, but it got shot down. They sent another, and lost that one, too. Then they ’ad just one left, and it was ’is granddad, sir. It was Gibby’s grandpa.”

  I listened, leaning forward.

  “They tossed ’im, sir. And up ’e went, spiraling over the trenches. There were shells exploding, bullets flying. One of them winged the bird, and ’e fell and splattered in the mud. But up ’e got, and off ’e went again, dodging through the bullets, sir. ’E’omed in seventeen minutes, and the British aimed their guns and knocked out the German artillery. It saved them all, sir. It saved the regiment.”

  “Jeepers,” I said.

  Bert rambled on about other birds in other lofts. He knew dozens of stories that sounded like wild adventures but were absolutely true. Pigeons had brought help to airmen forced down in Europe, to kites ditched in the Channel, and to others lost on the moors. He told me of one bird who had flown fifty ops when his bomber was forced down nearly four hundred miles from the airfield. The bird went for help. “And ’e ’omed in eight and a ’alf ’ours,” said Bert with awe in his voice. “Percy now: ’e would ’ave done it in five and a bit.” And he winked.

  I could have listened all day. The pigeons, to me and everyone, had been a bit of a joke all along. It had seemed ridiculous that we went flying in great machines jammed with men and tools, only to rely—in the end— on a bunch of feathers and a bird’s brain, on a grown-up egg. I had imagined the scientists, those brainy boffins, laughing at the idea of us carting pigeons everywhere we went. But now I saw the birds differently, and I thought I had found a sort of home in the pungent loft, a sort of eccentric uncle in the mocked-at pigeoneer.

  CHAPTER 12

  FOR EIGHT DAYS WE didn’t go flying. The war went on in little spurts, so distant that it might have been just a radio play on the wireless. The Flying Forts of the Mighty Eighth took a pasting over Kiel. The Italians surrendered the island of Lampione to the British, and the Chinese pushed back the Japs on a drive toward Chungking. But for us there was nothing but waiting.

  On eight mornings I dreaded the words that would come from the speaker, that would open a door on the beautiful lady of restful days or on the frightening tiger of ops.

  I came to hate that WAAF. When the week was finished, I despised her. I no longer saw her as young and pretty, but as a crone with snakelike arms, who took delight in torturing me. Every night I had my dream, and every morning I woke with a fear of flying and a fear of waiting. One seemed as bad as the other.

  There were endless parties in the mess. All the sergeants crashed about in the mad piggyback battles of Horsey, until there wasn’t an airman standing. Then they shifted to the wilder game of Tank, where crews of four picked up the sofas and went charging at each other down the length of the hut, meeting in the middle in a crack of furniture and bodies flying. The parties were hardly less dangerous than the ops.

  A new crew arrived to take the place of Donny’s. The sprogs moved into the empty beds and tried as hard as they could to fit in with the crowd. But I spent the days at the pigeon loft, watching the babies grow. When Bert was there, I listened to his stories about heroic birds. When he wasn’t, I told my troubles to Percy. And somehow the telling of them made them a bit easier to bear.

  Then on the twenty-first day of June, the WAAF told us, “You are on for tonight.” I realized right away that I’d been wrong. Flying was much, much worse than waiting.

  We were sent to Krefeld, back to the valley of the Ruhr.

  In the setting sun we lay on the grass under Buster’s wing. We all looked up at it, then down at our watches; this last bit of waiting was the hardest. It didn’t make it easier that the midsummer days were so long. With all of Britain set to double daylight saving time, it would be well past ten when the sun disappeared, and nearly midnight before twilight ended. Less than two hours later the moon would rise, lighting us up for the German fighters.

  Ratty looked at his rabbit’s foot, Will at his picture of his wife. Pop had his crucifix, Simon his scented handkerchief. Buzz was crawling around, searching for another four-leaf clover. I got out my ray-gun ring, slipped it on, and cupped my other hand across it.

  Foolish. As soon as you hide something, somebody notices. It was Sergeant Piper, trotting behind Lofty, who looked down and said, “What have you got in your hands, boy?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Suddenly everyone was looking at me.

  “Nothing?” he said. “Seems to me you’ve got something. Seems that way to me.”

  I shook my head.

  “Then open your hands. Show me, boy.”

  He couldn’t make me. I outranked him—in that useless, technical way. But I couldn’t argue with any grown-up, let alone Sergeant Piper. I spread my hands apart, palms up, hoping no one would see the wiry loop of the ring. To me it seemed as big as a doughnut.

  Sergeant Piper grunted. He moved his foot until it touched my hands. I didn’t know what he was thinking, maybe that I’d stolen one of his precious little tools and was somehow hiding it in a sort of magic trick. He said, “Turn them over, boy.”

  And I did.

  Ratty burst out laughing. So did everyone, except
for Buzz.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Sergeant Piper.

  It looked ridiculous. The little plastic barrel was aimed at him, and I wished that it was real, that it could melt him into a pool of slime.

  “It’s a ray-gun ring!” cried Buzz. There was only one way he could know that. He must have had a ray-gun ring himself. But even Buzz would have been smart enough to leave it home in Canada. “Kakabucka Rogers!” he cried. “Hey, Buck!”

  “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh,” I said.

  “You gonna vaporize the searchlights? Huh?” He rolled onto his stomach, laughing in his mindless way. I was sure he would go on and on about my ray-gun ring until Lofty sent us into Buster. But he found his lucky clover then, and forgot all about my ring. Buzz could never keep track of more than one idea at a time. “I got one, boys,” he cried, pulling up the sprig. “A four-leaf clover. Look at that!”

  Lofty said, “Let’s go.”

  We got up and piled aboard. I hauled myself through Buster’ s door, my legs suddenly as weak as spaghetti. My hands sweated so much that they stuck to the pigeon box as I stowed it away. We took our places, went through our checklists. We started the engines. “Rear door locked,” said Pop. “Ready to taxi.” I had never felt more trapped.

  The erks pulled the chocks away. Sergeant Piper raised a thumb, then scurried off as the engines raced and the airscrews growled like tigers.

  We taxied down to the end of the runway, right behind old J for Jam. We called up the tower to test the wireless. A WAAF said, “Read you five by five. Strength niner.”

  Lofty turned us onto the flare path. He put on the brakes and let the engines idle.

  Will was sitting beside him in the second dickey seat. “There goes Jam,” he said.

  I heard its engines race. Buster quivered in the propwash, and a hail of grit blew across our blister.

  “Gosh, look at him wobble,” said Will. “Lofty, what’s he— Holy crow!”

  The explosion shook me in my seat. The blast of light glowed in my window, then the shock rattled the whole bus and sent my pencil rolling across the desk.

  “What happened?” I said. Everyone was asking, and the intercom was choked with our voices. Bells clanged and jangled as a fire truck and a meat wagon went racing down the runway.

  “They just fell,” said Lofty. His voice was higher than it should have been. “They took off and they just—” He sounded as though he was shaking all over. “They fell.”

  I couldn’t see from my window. But the light of the fire shimmered on the wing and made yellow halos of the port-side airscrews.

  “They got a hundred yards maybe,” said Will. “No more than that, eh? Then they tipped over and went straight in. Rolled to the left and went straight in.”

  We sat twenty minutes there, next in line, before our flare went up. Then we started forward. We swung to the left. “Christ!” shouted Lofty. He swung us back too far; the engines sounded crazy. Then we ran straight again, gathering speed, and the tail lifted up.

  “Oo-oop,” said Ratty, his same old joke, as though he thought it would be bad luck not to say it.

  The ground fell away. Our landing gear started rising, our flaps pulling in. I saw the wreck of J for Jam, the firemen standing like black dots before the flames, shooting rainbows of foam that tore into streaks as they arced toward the burning metal.

  It was a terrible start to an op. Lofty puffed through his pipe all the way to Germany. We droned through searchlights and flak. We saw the flaming onions of the tracer shells flinging up at the stream, and we saw two bombers go down, riding rivers of fire. And then—fifty miles from Krefeld—one of our engines conked out.

  The change in sound was sudden, alarming. A shock seemed to run through me and set my heart pounding, and the old guy started yelling. Pop almost never raised his voice, but now he shouted at Lofty. And a whole series of memories flashed through my mind: our first flight in a Halifax; the instructor feathering an engine, and Lofty not knowing how to react. I remembered the instructor taking the controls, and how he had explained it all later on the ground, telling us how dangerous it was to lose an engine if you couldn’t figure out which one had quit. “You have to think it out,” he’d told Lofty. “Don’t act too fast.” If you did, and guessed wrong, you would put the crate into a spin, and you’d be lucky if you ever got it out.

  “Port!” the old guy was shouting.

  I didn’t know how Lofty could know what he meant. Had a port-side engine quit, or was Pop telling him to turn to port? They were opposite things, and if Lofty guessed wrong we were finished.

  “Port! Port!”

  Rudder cables creaked through their pulleys above me. The kite wallowed and tipped. We started turning, and the sky disappeared in my window, the ground rushing up to fill it. Sixty feet behind me the rudders were swinging over, and out on the wings the ailerons lifted and dipped. I braced against my desk, waiting for Buster to stall herself into a spin. But she leveled off, and I tasted rubber in my lungs as I took a deep, shaking breath. Lofty had guessed right.

  For a minute or two we flew along on three engines. The nose was pointed up, but we didn’t climb much higher. Buster banked and leveled, banked again, as though she wanted to turn, but Lofty wouldn’t let her. Then his voice came calmly through the intercom. “I say, chaps. What do you think? Go on or go home?”

  We were minutes from the target. We had come all the way from Yorkshire and had just nine more minutes to go. I didn’t want to carry on with three engines, to cross the city at twelve thousand feet—below even the Wimpies—with all the other Hallibags a mile above us and their bombs whistling down like metal hail. But if we turned back, our op wouldn’t count. We would have to wait all over again, on another night for another target, and I feared that even more.

  Pop wanted to press on; Buzz, to turn back. When Lofty took a vote, it came out a three-three tie because I was too frightened to speak.

  “Kak?” asked Lofty. “What do you say, Kid?”

  I knew my voice would tremble. I leaned out from my desk, through the curtains, and Lofty looked down. I pointed toward the nose, jabbing with my finger.

  “The Kid says ‘carry on,’” said Lofty.

  I heard someone chuckle in the intercom. I thought it was Pop. It was certainly his voice that said quietly, “Good for you, Kid.” Lofty didn’t say anything. He just kept flying the kite, jinking through the moonlight on his course for the target. I rubbed and rubbed at my ray-gun ring as Buster bobbed and dipped. Will said he could see Krefeld up ahead, the flak bursting in the searchlight beams. He said it was particularly heavy. “Hang on,” he said. “We’re going to get shaken like dice.”

  Buster yawed to the left, banked sharply right. Lofty muttered something; then he swore. “To hell with it,” he said. “Bomb doors open.”

  There was a lever at his right arm, and he must have pulled it before he finished speaking. Already I could hear the great doors swinging open.

  But he didn’t drop the bombs right away. We turned away from the target and fell from the stream.

  Buster wallowed in a wail of wind, changed now with the doors open and an engine gone. I waited for the click of the latches that freed the bombs, for the jolt as the weight fell away.

  We leveled off and dropped a flare. Ratty watched it sizzle down behind us, over empty fields turned bright in its whiteness. “Nothing there. Not even a cow to hit,” he said.

  Lofty jettisoned the bombs, their latches tapped like metal fingers. My seat pressed against me as Buster lifted in the air. The doors pulled shut, and home we went with no one talking.

  The wreck of J for Jam was still smoldering when we touched down in Yorkshire. It was a pile of red embers and a coil of smoke, and the smell hung around as the erks guided us to a stop at dispersal. Sergeant Piper wasn’t pleased. He hardly looked at us, and he didn’t believe there was very much wrong with our engine.

  We took our parachutes and our gear and waited for t
he truck to pick us up. Lofty sucked so hard on his pipe that the air whistled through it.

  In minutes the erks had the cowling off the engine. They shone torches over the metal, and rapped at things with their wrenches. Then they drew away, and the engine whined as it turned over. With a puff of smoke and a roar, it started right up. The airscrew buzzed and buzzed, and I saw Lofty’s shoulders slump.

  “We should have gone on,” he said. “Damn. We should have gone on.”

  “Don’t bind yourself,” said Will. “It’s too late now.”

  Lofty was angry. “The ruddy old ship. The ruddy old engines. It must have run out of fuel; the ruddy tank went dry.”

  Maybe he thought the old guy was half deaf, but Pop heard him all right, and spoke up from the grass. “There was plenty of petrol, Skipper,” he said.

  “Look, it was nobody’s fault,” shouted Simon. “It was just a bloody balls-up.”

  Then Ratty laughed. Poor little Ratty, he always found a laugh in everything. “It’s like I’m back at home,” he said, lounging on the grass. “You guys sound just like my dear old mom and dad.”

  He was trying to cheer up Lofty, but Lofty wouldn’t be cheered. It was the skipper who made the decisions, who had to explain it all to the CO and the grim-faced officers who sat around the debriefing table. We thought they’d be angry that we had failed to reach the target, and they did sit with their arms crossed as Lofty talked. They sat as still as lumps of earth. Then they said they understood; they all said that. Uncle Joe just shrugged. “Your engine conked out; you came back. I might have done the same thing.”

  Or he might not; we knew what he meant. Uncle Joe had crossed all of Happy Valley on only two engines once, and had come home in a kite so riddled with holes that he’d taxied it straight to the boneyard. He’d got a gong for that, one of the long row that hung across his chest like Christmas bulbs.

  I felt sorry for Lofty, who was kicking himself so hard inside that his eyelids were quivering. It was only our third op, and not a good sign to come back early. I imagined he was worried that Uncle Joe would think of him as a coward. He kicked himself out of debriefing and kicked himself into the mess. And then he saw the Morris list, and a little smile came to his face.