The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  In the silence, only the cow and the frogs. The rats, mercifully, had been stilled by Liv’s voice.

  “Was your father somehow involved in a child’s death?” I asked, pulling the truth from the shadow of the dream somehow, or one bit of the truth.

  “It’s what the newspapers said,” she answered quietly. “After Mom died. They said Daddy oughtn’t to have been delivering babies. They said his grief had made him unfit to work and he knew that, he knew he ought to have called in another doctor. They said the baby died when any other doctor would have saved her. And then Daddy killed himself.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  The newspapers had gotten it all wrong, she whispered. About her mother. About the baby her father had tried to save the morning of her mother’s funeral. About everything that happened afterward.

  I thought of Mrs. Roosevelt’s note tucked into my rucksack, all those people who read “Operating Room by Flashlight” or saw Liv’s photographs imagining Joey eating his peach ice cream.

  “Geoff slept on the floor beside my bed after that,” Liv said, “until the battle over Daddy’s estate began and we were sent to live with different relatives. We finished school and turned eighteen in the same week, and we moved back home, just Geoff and me, and he started at Dartmouth so he could live at home. English literature, even though Daddy had always wanted him to study medicine. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed and Geoffrey signed up, and it was just me.”

  I intertwined my fingers with hers, and we lay there, staring up into the darkness of the barn rafters, the silence of the war taking a few hours off.

  “Geoffrey is out there somewhere,” she said. “I’d feel it if he were dead.”

  I squeezed her hand.

  She said, “I don’t know if I could bear this now if you weren’t here, Jane. Thank you for coming after me.”

  “Well . . .” I said.

  “Thank you for not trying to stop me,” she said.

  “I meant to,” I said.

  A creature burrowed in the hay several yards away and we both turned toward the sound.

  Liv said, “If you meant to stop me that morning, Jane, why did you bring your rucksack and your typewriter?”

  She started singing then, the way we used to sing in the tent at the field hospital, with Marie. Softly. Barely over a whisper. And I sang with her. “The White Cliffs of Dover.” “Always. “As Time Goes By.”

  “Liv?” I said as we settled into silence again, heading toward sleep.

  “What is it, Jane?”

  “Thank you, Liv.”

  “What do you have to thank me for, except dragging you out into this dreadful war?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you for everything, Liv.”

  SAINT-LÔ-PÉRIERS ROAD

  TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1944

  Glad to learn that some of my photos are at least doing a little bit of good.

  —Photojournalist John Stephen Wever, upon hearing that his shot of a wounded man receiving blood plasma in an alley in Sicily caused record numbers of donors to stream into Red Cross blood banks across the United States

  Fletcher awoke in a sweat, his heart pounding. He sat up abruptly, relieved to see only the shadow of the barn walls around him, the closely studded timbers and the yellow clay dried in between them in thick, unsmoothed clumps. He exhaled: just a dream. Liv was on the other side of the barn—or at least she wasn’t beside him, naked in his arms. And Charles was not there either; Charles was back in New York finishing the important job of moving words around on a page, or perhaps sitting down to a late dinner with his supposed mistress, a newspaper magnate’s niece.

  Hell, where did rumors like that come from?

  Hell, where did dreams like that come from?

  Though a part of him thought the dream had been lovely, really. Much better than the other. Better to be found by a jealous husband than by a lousy bastard German.

  A part of him wanted to climb back into the dream.

  He longed for the cigar Charles had been smoking in the dream. Did anyone make cigars anymore?

  The rumor about Charles’s mistress—that he’d heard again at the press camp two days earlier, along with the dawn reports from the front and the news of the progress of the war. It was the kind of gossip people fixed on because it amused them even though there was certainly a logical explanation: the girl was visiting her uncle in New York, perharps, and her uncle brought her along to dinner with Charles, and Charles and the niece were seen alone in the moment the uncle had left the table to use the loo.

  Fletcher brushed the hay from his sleeves, pulled off his helmet and got a cigarette from the pack in the liner, then, thought better of lighting anything in the barn. The hay was warm and he hated to climb from it back into the constant chill, but he did want the cigarette. He grabbed his camera out of habit and headed down the ladder.

  It was early, the dawn not even close to breaking over the barnyard, the air thick with the night damp. He stood outside, thinking of the cow that had made all that noise, imagining how delicious fresh warm milk would taste. But when he closed his jacket up to his neck and set out to investigate, he found that the creature was a single, lonely bull.

  He thought he should return to the barn and its warm hay, perhaps to write Elizabeth another light letter that would make the war seem an easy thing, that would make his homecoming seem sure but would say nothing about what they would do when he returned. He knew he ought to write her, and he knew he shouldn’t write her, just as he knew he both loved her and didn’t love her at all.

  He would have loved the child. He was sure of that. He would have loved Elizabeth’s child even more because the baby would have been Edward’s.

  He smoked, leaning back against the wooden counterbalance gate, the cigarette tip glowing red until it nearly burned his finger. It was foolish to smoke out in the open in the near darkness this close to the front, but it was foolish, too, to carry around two AWOL American women. It was foolish even just to sleep in a barn, especially one recently abandoned by the Krauts. The bastards slept in the barns and they knew you would, too, and so they often left the haylofts mined as they retreated. Just as you poked your foot in deeper to get a little warmer, you could be looking at a leg without a foot, if you were left with eyes to look. And even if the barn wasn’t mined, airmen and artillery both liked to blow up barns just for fun.

  Sometimes you needed a good night’s sleep in a barn, though. Sometimes you needed the freedom of being able to have a cigarette wherever and whenever you wanted even more than you needed to stay alive.

  He crushed the butt into the muck and moved cautiously, climbing through a few hedgerows toward what was now the front and had been for days: camouflaged tanks hidden in the brush, most equipped with the new “rhino” hedgerow-cutter steel prongs thanks to one soldier with a good idea; artillery at the ready to move forward after the bombing; and men—everywhere there were men, all dug in. GIs slept in foxholes around the tops of which were the necessities for keeping themselves alive: rations and water, bandages in their musette bags, ammunition clips, hand grenades. Some slept on the earth above their foxholes, drier but more dangerous ground. They stretched south almost to the Saint-Lô–Périers road—the front until the troops had fallen back a few days before, reluctantly giving up a thousand hard-fought yards to allow the air force some margin for error.

  Looking over the scene, Fletcher sighed in appreciation of the night spent in the warm hay.

  He listened carefully, heard soft voices, followed them to a gun pit he’d visited the first night, a circular pit a meter deep and three wide, rimmed with sandbags. He always looked for the gun crews in the predawn because they were awake and had an ear to their telephone connection to the battery at all times, ever ready for orders to fire. They tended to know what was what.

  This crew had had a quiet night from the looks of it: only a dozen empty 90mm casings were stacked behind the pit to be collected and returned for refilling. F
letcher called out softly to let them know it was him, and waited for one of the gunners to peek over the back edge of the pit.

  “It’s Baron von Flash, the mighty Brit!” the gunner said into the pit. Fletcher liked these chaps for the nicknames alone—and not just the one they’d given him. While most of the gunner teams named their guns things like Tomahawk or Thor, this crew had named theirs W-w-w-w-wobbly, the stutter perfectly describing the way the gun jittered as it was aimed.

  Two soldiers manned the gun’s bucket seats and a third the phone line, but one of the others snored and another ate a ration. Fletcher offered them cigarettes, and they turned to the chap on the telephone, who shrugged. The weather made flying as difficult for the Germans as for the Allies.

  Two Midwestern twangs and one smooth Virginia drawl accepted fags and pulled the camouflage net over the top of the pit before lighting up. With the pit closed up like that, the smells grew stronger: bodies that hadn’t showered in weeks, morning breath, the egg-meat mixture of the K rations, damp blankets, the mud itself, the brush, the smoke.

  Fletcher lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  One of the GIs coughed, a deep, racking cough. Fletcher wondered if the poor chap ought not head to the battalion aid station; surely he could use hot food and clean hospital sheets. But if he was sick enough, his buddies would make him go back to the aid station. For the most part, though, the men toughed it out at the front. They could no more abandon their mates than Fletcher could abandon Liv.

  The thought startled him. As soon as the breakthrough was under way, he told himself, he would set off on his own again. He worked better on his own.

  He touched his pocket, where he kept the photograph of Elizabeth Houck-Smythe.

  “Any word yet?” he asked the soldiers. “Is today the day?”

  The Virginian said he sure hoped so. They were tired of waiting, antsy from the waiting.

  Fletcher chatted up the chap on the phone, who would know the most. Nothing about the morning bombing had yet come over the field phone or the radio.

  “All right, then,” Fletcher said, and he climbed from the pit and continued on past the colored-flag markers, creeping over to the German side.

  SAINT-LÔ-PÉRIERS ROAD

  TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1944

  I’m sure that back in England that night other men—bomber crews—almost wept . . . But I want to say this to them. The chaos and bitterness there in the orchards and between the hedgerows that afternoon have passed . . . Anybody makes mistakes . . . The smoke and confusion of battle bewilder us all on the ground as well as in the air.

  —Journalist Ernie Pyle

  The sky was larger, lighter, and I was awake, eating the compressed corn flakes from a K ration, when Fletcher returned to the barn. In minutes, we’d have the company of other journalists hopeful that today would be the day. Maybe even the sound of engines overhead.

  We climbed back into the hayloft and called quietly to Liv, found her sleeping, openmouthed, bits of straw webbing through her hair.

  “Liv,” Fletcher said, popping open a tin of breakfast rations near her ear to wake her.

  Liv’s complexion was an odd mushroomy shade I imagined only a strong pot of coffee could overcome.

  “We’ve a lovely bit of breakfast for you this morning,” Fletcher said.

  She pushed the can away.

  I said, “What? This is America’s finest. Egg and . . . what kind of meat is this anyway, Fletch? All mushed together in a tiny tin.”

  Liv closed her eyes again. She had never been much for breakfast even back at the field hospital.

  Fletcher sniffed at the awful muck. “You told me yesterday that you loved this, Livvie.”

  Liv sat up, and she asked for a biscuit, and Fletcher handed her one of the cracker-like little pucks along with the rest of the breakfast ration box. She took a bite of biscuit, then examined the fruit bar and handed it and the Nescafé and sugar tablets back to him. She pocketed the chewing gum for the next poker game.

  Fletcher dug into the disgusting egg-and-meat mixture.

  “Sadly, there’s nothing left in the garden,” I said.

  Fletcher pocketed the water purification tablets and downed the rest of the ration. He tucked the second ration back into his rucksack.

  Liv took the toilet paper from the ration and headed behind the barn.

  Ernie Pyle didn’t come that morning. He’d gone farther forward and slept in a foxhole at the front. We watched with everyone else, though, as the first planes passed overhead, as they dropped the smoke to mark the bomb line, the smoke floating to a field not far ahead. Fletcher stood stoop-shouldered between Liv and me, his beard coming in a steely gray despite his attempts to shave it back. Already we could hear the dive-bombers coming, the P-47s. The world filled with the hurricane swirl of them—the sharp crack of the bombs landing and the screams of the diving wings and the slick rip of the machine guns—and everywhere we looked, there they were, circling and diving and rising back up.

  A deeper rumble arose from behind us, louder and louder.

  “The heavies,” Fletcher shouted over the noise.

  Flying Fortresses, that’s what they were called, and that’s what they looked like, flying close together, twelve at a time in groups of three dozen until there were hundreds of them, everywhere you looked.

  I leaned back, a thrill of anticipation welling in me as I looked straight up, my helmet falling to the ground behind me. I shivered for the enemy on the other side of the colored cloth that marked the bomb line.

  Fletcher stooped beside me while Liv set her camera for infinity, estimated the exposure, and pointed upward, took a shot: the underbelly of all that destruction.

  Fletcher stood and set my helmet back on my head, and buckled it tight. He set his hands on the sides of it as if trying to shield my ears from the roar of the planes. In that moment, I thought he might kiss me. I imagined his lips on mine, his tongue pressing, his breath slightly rank from living outdoors, his beard rough, and I imagined cutting his gray hair for him again, having only that moment and glad for it.

  The big bombs started falling then, the dust and debris rising up from the earth in front of us, like the world’s end. As the sky grew slowly darker, I breathed in the sharp smell of burning.

  Fletcher said something right into my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. I leaned close, wanting the words, whatever he might say, but there was nothing but the sound of the planes and the rumbling through my feet, my unsteady legs, the sudden sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Each gulp of sooty air seemed a gift.

  And all the time, Liv kept the Leica raised.

  Fletcher began taking photos, too, the die-cast body bumping his cheek as he swung to take photograph after photograph: of the dive-bombers, the bigger planes, the distant spewing earth, the smoke rising higher and higher in the sky. Though we couldn’t have been any closer, these shots would be nothing; this could not really be committed to film, not from this distance, not probably in any event. And yet I felt almost as if the bombs were moving closer to us rather than farther forward. The bombing line was tight up against the Allied soldiers, just a hundred feet south of the Saint-Lô–Périers road, but we were well enough behind it to be safe. It was the sound: bomb after bomb exploding until no loud noise would ever startle us again.

  I felt more alive than I ever had.

  The ack-ack of German guns joined the fray. And Fletcher was behind Liv then. Right behind her. Shouting words she couldn’t possibly hear over the noise. I was sure, suddenly, that he would kiss her, that the way he’d looked at me was some kind of dress rehearsal, and I felt so ridiculous to be worrying about who was kissing whom or not even kissing but only wanting to as all that death rained down, to be so relieved when Fletcher pointed to a plane—one of the Piper Cubs, the little planes flying low, spotting the German guns and radioing back their positions.

  Fletcher shouted again, shaking his head.

  Liv lowered her camera to broaden
her field of view, and I, too, saw what Fletcher did, what he already had his camera fixed on: a plane burning bright against the smoke.

  Another burst into flames, and another, slashing the sky. Still the planes came forward, forward.

  A parachute opened white into the smoke, another here, another there, and a gasp broke through the clamor, a sound escaping improbably from my own chest as a single parachute hung up on a wing, a man suspended underneath it, struggling to free himself.

  The yellow-orange flames crept toward him. Leapt at the white of the parachute. Caught it in a burst.

  The flyer disappeared, leaving only the flames, the smoke.

  A tiny black figure fell from the flames.

  Fletcher swung his camera, but the airman was already gone.

  The sick expression in Liv’s eyes as she lowered her camera: yes, she’d gotten the shot.

  This is it, I told myself. The breakthrough. Good Lord, at what cost?

  Fletcher raised his camera again as the ground exploded in great heaves, the spewing earth filling more and more of our world, so close that Fletcher kept wiping his lens with a cloth and Liv couldn’t keep her camera steady; she kept lurching back from the shots.

  Another plane burst into flames, seemingly right overhead. I could feel the explosions now in the trembling of my fingertips as I tried to get words onto my notepad.

  What the hell were they doing? The bombs were getting closer.

  Maybe the smoke being carried back toward us by the breeze confused the planes about the location of the bombing line. Maybe something had gone wrong in the equipment in the lead plane, which determined where every bomber in the formation dropped its load so that 288 bombs fell in one great blast. Whatever had happened, the bombs were falling short of their target.