Alive and Kicking

by Chris Lynch

  But a fight it was. My first live combat.

  I collapse involuntarily as my knees finally reveal all that my nervous system has been through.

  “Ha!” Gallagher says when he finds me wedged down there in his world.

  “So, this is how it’s gonna be, huh?” I say to him.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, laughing a degree or two less meanly than usual. “This, and then this again, then a whole lot more this waiting behind it.”

  “It is a very flawed aircraft,” Bell says grimly.

  “So, what do you care if it’s fat and ugly?” Gallagher says.

  “I don’t,” he says. “But I do care that it’s a lot harder to maneuver in tight formation than the Fortress is. I care about that a lot.”

  Gallagher laughs some more as I climb up off the floor, and I start to think that this post-bombing Gallagher is kind of giddy and freakish, with weird energy to burn away. I prefer this version. I hope we drop nonstop ordnance everywhere, just to make the working atmosphere around here a bit more fun.

  “I can handle this aircraft, Lieutenant Bell,” Ormston surprises us all by kind of yelling. “Whatever she requires, your pilot and copilot are equal to the task, and if you don’t feel you can have confidence in that, then you are free to seek a transfer whenever you like.”

  “It was not a criticism of personnel, sir,” Bell says without turning back in Ormston’s direction.

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I think morale might be better served if you don’t critique the ship. Certainly not while she’s not even had a chance to catch her breath after such a battle.”

  Gallagher is still at it. “Well, to be fair, sir, she could maybe breathe a little better if she wasn’t so fat and ugly.”

  There is no acknowledgment at all from the pilots’ station.

  “I happen to think she’s beautiful,” I say to Gallagher. Bell is hunched over his navigator’s table again.

  “Well, that’s good, McCallum. It really is a fine thing. Especially since you’re the guy most likely to be stuck with her. Go down with the ship, as the saying goes.”

  “Oh,” I say, trying to act even colder than I am, which would be a temperature that probably doesn’t even exist. “The Flying Coffin thing? Big deal.”

  “That is enough, gentlemen,” Ormston declares. “McCallum, armaments check, work your way from the tail on up. If we have to fight again in twenty minutes, you see that we’re loaded up and ready.”

  Since it feels like I’ve been trapped in that tiny asylum greenhouse with the front-of-house guys for a whole month, a little round-the-ship inventory sounds just fine to me.

  For some strange reason that probably makes sense to him, Gallagher decides to follow behind like my assistant or something as I work my way along the narrow spaces toward the tiny catwalk that connects the front of the plane with the rear, over the bomb bay.

  “What are you doing, Lieutenant Gallagher?” Ormston wants to know since he is the boss and all.

  “Thought I’d go for a little stretch, too. Gets kinda squirrelly up there in the compartment, as you can imagine.”

  “Lieutenant,” Ormston huffs, “I don’t believe you could imagine the things I can imagine. And I’m sure I don’t want to imagine what you can imagine. So we’ll just leave out the suspense. Go back and man that nose gun.”

  That does make me want to let out a little victory laugh, but Gallagher himself beats me to it. Louder and nutsier than I would have laughed to boot.

  “Stuck in the nose of the Flying Coffin,” he says, mock serious. “You might have a point there, Bell, about the curious construction of this beast. Surely there should be more than one way out.”

  There is only one exit from which to bail out, because it’s the only exit big enough for a man wearing a parachute to fit through. That escape is at the tail gunner’s position, as far away as it could be from the nose gunner’s.

  Every bomber has its own nickname and artwork painted along one or both sides of the nose. It’s unofficial stuff, purely down to the crews themselves, but once it’s on there it stays there until the guys crash the artwork into the side of a mountain or the bottom of an ocean. I don’t know when it happened or how it was decided, but as I approach the plane one crisp, clear November morning, there it is.

  BATBOY. And the painted image is of a kid in a too-large baseball uniform, smiling out at the world as he swings at an also too-large baseball, missing it by a country mile. The quality of the art is at about cave-painting level but there is no missing the expression on the batter, who looks like he’s taken one too many fastballs to the coconut.

  I stand for ages looking at the thing, not entirely sure I am even really seeing this image on this plane.

  The next man out is our engineer, Sergeant Couley.

  “What do you know about this, Couley?” I ask.

  “Me? I’m the one guy who knows everything about this plane.”

  Since Couley seems satisfied with the incompleteness of that answer, I think maybe some nudging is in order.

  “Who put it there, Couley, is what I mean? Who decided? Was there a meeting I missed or something where this was voted on?”

  He sighs, puts a fatherly hand on my shoulder, even though he’s barely older than me, and says, “I said I knew everything about the plane, McCallum. Now you’re asking me about art and politics and everything that just makes things messier. Listen, do yourself a favor. Point, and shoot. Keep it simple. Point and shoot and leave everything else to everybody else and you’ll do just fine.”

  He walks then toward the plane’s tail to climb inside and start his routine of checking over each little detail and then each detail within that detail two or three times over before most guys have even finished chow. I follow him inside.

  When I catch up to him swiveling Boyd’s tail gunner turret back and forth rapidly to test its responsiveness, he looks right up and gives me a grin.

  “What I do know is that every man on this crew is a real baseball fan. So, maybe if I were you I’d take it as a kind of compliment. We love the game and we’re pleased to have a certified somebody who’s played ball at a high level on our team.”

  That stops me short enough. As a guy who swore not to say another word about baseball out loud until the day he could say it to his brother, I should probably be ashamed of how proud and — as Mam would surely point out — immodest I became just a few seconds ago. US Army Air Force Engineer, Gunner, Sergeant George Couley has turned a pretty neat trick there.

  It takes him only those few words, those few seconds, to defuse a small flint of something I’ve been letting burn at the center of my guts. A flint of lots of somethings, probably, that have just been feeding on themselves until probably they would’ve burnt me up completely from the inside on out. A few words and a few seconds was enough for just one guy to replace that burning with a little ball of pride.

  And then, it takes him even fewer words and seconds to poke it into something else altogether. “Even though, y’know, really, the A’s? The A’s lower-level farm team to boot?”

  His tone is meant, I think, to convey pity for what I went through back in the trenches of Federalsburg. I’m not biting.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Eastern Shore League. Not so glamorous, maybe, but plenty scrappy. Produced quite a few fine ballplayers who went on to bigger things. Mickey Vernon came out of the Eastern Shore. Carl Furillo. Jimmie Foxx. You know Jimmie Foxx? Don’t get much bigger than Double X, I’ll tell ya that.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Couley says, putting both hands on my shoulders to calm me down, though it makes me even edgier to feel his grip. “I believe you that it’s a beautiful part of the world, hardworking league, all that. I simply hope they work some actual farms on those lower-level farm teams, so they could be tending spinach or carrots or something good for society on those fields, in between dropping routine fly balls and swinging at 3-and-0 curveballs in the dirt.”

  There was a time when I would have had a
snappy comeback for this. And I would have even had fun delivering it. But, I feel like a pitcher standing on the mound who knows he hasn’t got his good stuff going for him and has no idea if it’s coming back.

  I try to pull my shoulders from his hands, stepping sideways, but he surprises me by stepping right with me, like it’s a dance or something. And still, there are those hands gripping these shoulders.

  “It’s just a little needlin’, McCallum, that’s all. It’s practically required around here, trapped with this bunch of salamis, trying to kill half the world before they kill our half. It’ll make ya bananas if ya don’t sometimes think of dumb stuff to say just to fill the airspaces. Right? I mean, right?”

  I am, I’m afraid, getting a little of the bananas business he refers to. But I also didn’t think I was making it anybody else’s problem.

  “Right,” I say, happier than a professional world-class gunman should probably sound. “Right, I was just giving it back to ya. I was playing a higher level of ball than, what, ninety-five percent of players ever reach. And if this wicked, stupid … thing didn’t come along and stop everybody’s world right in their tracks …”

  “Exactly. And you are still a young pup. You’ll start climbing your way back to the top again. You’ll be aces and life will be perfect for elite talent like yourself. Once we get this job here done right first, however.”

  I nod, with some force, and likewise remove Couley’s hands from my shoulders.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “You’re welcome. But you already must know any one of us would club you in the street with your own bat to get where you got. Even, with, well, you know.”

  “That’s a sorry mark of things,” I say. “Here I am all the way over in England, spending much of my time at twenty or twenty-five thousand feet, shooting all the bad guys. Then I’m discovered to be a professional prospect in America’s greatest sport … the sport that we are all here fighting for, by the way … and somehow the whole deal tumbles because I’m followed by the Philadelphia Athletics’ worldwide reputation for stinking so bad, so often.”

  Couley makes a sound that’s as much like a shrug as anything and turns his attention again to the tail turret, which makes a faint grinding noise when the guns are turned straight up.

  “I have to tell you something,” says Boyd, the tail gunner himself, as he pops through the rear opening right next to his place of work. He seems fairly grim and serious in his manner and expression, and reflexively I find myself mirroring all that.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Well, I think you should take that hard luck story of yours, with the horror of being a prisoner of the historically hopeless baseball club that is the Philadelphia DOA’s and try telling it around, just for fun, to see how much sympathy you get. I’d love to hear the opinions you’d get out of the Europeans we’ve come to save from all the misery they’ve been suffering though. Unfortunately we’ve had to also obliterate a good bit of history and culture and people and stuff in the process.”

  And at this point, this is where I know I should take a snap-crack at Sergeant Boyd. The same Boyd who is usually counted among the decents and bearables, but seems to have had a nasty fall off his very high horse this morning as he made his way to the noble and reliable Batboy.

  But, I don’t have the goods for him. Wherever those goods currently are they are locked away securely and I don’t have access. I still have the power of staring, staring stupidly and at length, however. So I give him that. There.

  I would say that Sergeant Boyd is unmoved by my steely and stealthy act of aggression beamed across the few feet of space separating us. But that is not the case. The stare he offers in return is total incomprehension. Studied incomprehension, which is even better because he’s trying to work me out and is failing.

  Sergeant Couley may or may not have solved the noise issue that bothered him, but either way, he rises from his engineer’s fidgety fix-it-all crouch and pivots smoothly around and into the tail gunner’s battle station, hands on guns, feet on floor pedals, shifting slightly my way, or Boyd’s way, or both.

  “It’s very … adversarial in here today, men. Can you feel it? I can feel it, and I started it, so I should know. Nobody feels too great about anything right now, as everybody is aware. Our first mission as a group was, in the complicated dialect of the military, a ‘less than optimal, however successful, outcome.’ We here in the armed services of course understand the English translation to be that basically we took a whole lot of industrial muscle to perform a pretty straightforward hammer job, all in an effort to terrify our enemies into understanding that we — the long-anticipated units of the US Army Air Forces — mean business in the same way as God means business with His heavy artillery. God has famine, and pestilence, and floods and so on. While we, bring War. We bring it with more resources, more innovation, and more raw firepower than any force in history. Short, naturally, of God. But the other big difference is, when God goes after you with, maybe locusts or something, well, you just consider yourself beaten from the get-go, wiped out, barren, and left with running away as the only option open to you, provided God is even in that soft a mood, which isn’t often in the year of our Lord 1942 and you happen to be Jewish or Chinese or Polish or taller than Adolph Hitler or moored minding your own business at Pearl Harbor, to mention just a few of the unchosen people of our times.”

  Then there is a pause, which is as welcome to me as it probably is to Boyd. Though I’m not sure for Couley it is even intentional. He’s distractedly messing with a mounted pair of Browning .50 caliber machine guns, like you do when you are trying so hard to regain your train of thought that you could just … scream, we hope, or possibly flex your fingers a little too much.

  “You were pointing out everybody’s tense right now,” I say.

  “And,” Boyd adds, “pointing out the way to tell the difference between you and God.”

  “Right, that’s the critical thing, though no, smart guy, I didn’t say between myself and God. The difference is between the world’s most powerful and righteous militarized force for good — and please don’t need me to tell you who that is — and the Almighty Himself when He, too, gets a notion that someone doing evil needs smiting.” Couley takes a breath, pausing long enough to register we are all but scratching our heads at this. “Oh, stop pretending with those looks,” he says, “ ’cause you both know exactly what I’m saying. When God goes to the effort of bringing almighty wrath to your door, your door is no more. God doesn’t leave you just a little upset, and with some bruising to your cheek when you provoke His fury. God does not walk away from administering His terrible swift vengeance with a blackened eye and a bloody nose out of the bargain, does He?”

  At this instant I’m not too disappointed that my wisecracking impulse has gone AWOL because I have no interest in seeing how far Couley is liable to take this. And if my impulse was back with me I would without a doubt aim it at twelve o’clock high and probably end up with that bloody nose myself. With the mouth I used to have on me, I was usually asking for that type of response. Of course, back then I always had backup.

  “I wouldn’t think He would, no,” Boyd says agreeably.

  “Nope, He would surely not,” Couley says. “But we absolutely did. Half our fleet got shot up enough to delay at least two operations over the past week while they got patched.”

  “Yeah,” I say, turning away. I don’t like this turn, the truth of it, the fact and the feeling, the failure of execution that allowed that batch of nasty little German fighter birds to create such a smoke-and-bullet ballet that we did no more than a quarter of the damage we’d been sent to France to carry out. The damage we left in our wake tallied way, way less than we thought we saw through the smoke, and the bullets, and the bold, fearless, distracting manner with which they took the fight to us and took true victory away.

  Not only that, which would have been humiliation enough. They also took the opportunity we gave them and put a
gleaming, magnificent machine, one of our Flying Fortresses from the 392nd BG, right down into the English Channel, with her whole crew of ten dedicated men taking the trip with her to the bottom.

  Planes go down. They tell us that every day of our Air Corps lives. I know that as well as the guys — and there are lots of them around here — who have seen it happen right in front of their eyes, watched fifty planes and five hundred crewmen crushed and thrown and incinerated and butchered in fifty different horrifying ways. But for the past week I have not seen a single face on any corner of the base at Shipdham that didn’t burn with the same burn that I have been feeling and wearing since that Flying Fortress fell.

  “McCallum, don’t leave,” Boyd calls after I have obviously already left. I have weaved my way up the tight passageway that regularly takes me from the tail gunner’s solitary nest up to the waist of the Liberator, where both side guns and the belly and top turret weapons are clustered in a sort of rapid-fire neighborhood, then on to the comparative luxury of the flight deck, where the pilot and copilot’s seats are heated and armored and rumored to be as expertly padded as they look. I have never sat in one myself. The engineer’s top turret perch is secured right up close behind the flight deck thrones of the plane’s exalted command class, but proximity is about the only thing they share in this rigid little society of ours.

  I take a few deep breaths and return to the tail end, to the two men who happen to make a living shooting Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, just like I do. We shoot at threatening things so our people can drop our bombs correctly and accurately on other dangerous things, while we all coexist inside this Batboy we seem to have inherited, or made, invented, or maybe were swallowed whole by.

  “We talked about it and we agreed,” Sergeant Couley says, “that any team you played on must have had something going for it. You would have been a formidable opponent, and tough to play against. By which I mean, jokes are just jokes, but this here, is respect.”