Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  “Sir.” Shorty saluted.

  Garrett’s wolf whistle broke the moment. “She can wave my wand any time she wants,” he said.

  “A little respect, huh?” said Broben. “That’s a lady you’re talking about.”

  The ten of them were gathered around the front of the bomber now. Captain, copilot, navigator, bombardier, flight engineer. Left and right waist gunners, tail gunner, belly gunner. And Shorty the radio operator, who glanced among their faces, looking for frowns, knitted brows, cocked heads. He didn’t find any. Even the new guy was looking on in open admiration, though he couldn’t have fully appreciated what he was seeing.

  The painting on the nose of the Flying Fortress showed a sorceress. Not a witch, not a hag. A long, slim, pale-skinned woman in a skintight navy-blue leotard. Long black hair and pale green eyes. She was posed like the figurehead on an old sailing ship, or the hood ornament on a Cadillac. Nearly prone, back arched, one arm back and one outstretched and raven hair windswept. As if diving through the water or the air. Long pale legs, one bent at the knee. A gauzy blue cape flowed from her shoulders. A black wand in her outstretched hand pointed toward the .50-cal cheek gun emerging from a clear plexiglas window. She was long and angular and strong, joyous in her flight but determined in her attitude. Her face was stern and regal and refined. Not a grin but the ghost of a smile. Her clear-eyed gaze was fixed on something beyond the aircraft. Always looking ahead, always flying to meet it.

  This was no Betty Grable in a bathing suit. No girlish Vargas pinup. This was a da Vinci angel ethereal in metal, a Waterhouse nymph resplendent in flight. Beautiful and refined, magical and eerie and not quite of this earth.

  In the background floated isolated clouds. Some of them looked oddly solid, like granite, and at least one looked suspiciously like a medieval castle.

  The lettering beneath the flying woman was shadowed script, almost a signature. Fata Morgana.

  The men were quiet, looking at her. Shorty realized that he had never once seen his crewmates together and quiet, except at mission briefings right before wheels-up. It made him nervous.

  Then Garrett said, “Still needs bigger tits.”

  Lieutenant Broben took off his hat and rubbed his brush cut and sighed. He put an arm around Shorty and stood looking at the painting. “I apologize, ma’am,” Broben told the flying figure. “An angel could play the violin, and some guys would only hear a horse’s tail sawing on a piece of catgut.”

  “Well what else is it?” asked Garrett.

  Broben dropped his arm from Shorty and turned to Farley. “I got an idea,” he said. “Tomorrow, let’s just drop Garrett on Germany. The Nazis’ll be finished in a week.”

  “I think it’d violate the Geneva Convention,” said Farley. “There are some things you just can’t do in a war. Even to Nazis.”

  Broben sighed. “Bombs it is, then.”

  “Like civilized men,” Farley agreed.

  Martin shook his head. “I can’t keep up with you guys,” he said.

  Boney pointed the stem of his pipe at the bomber. “Keep up in there,” he said.

  Martin looked at the bombardier. Tall and skinny and very pale. Gaunt face impassive behind his fuming pipe. It was the first thing the man had said since Martin had arrived.

  “Boney talks like he bombs,” Shorty told him. “He doesn’t drop one till he’s sure it’s gonna hit.”

  Martin pointed to the lettering. “Fata Morgana?” he asked.

  “Fay-tuh Mor-gon-uh,” Shorty corrected.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Tell him what it means, Joseph,” said Broben.

  “Yeah, tell him, cap,” said Garrett. “I want to hear it again, too.”

  “Maybe it’ll sink in this time,” said Everett.

  Garrett punched him on the shoulder.

  “All right,” said Farley. He looked around self-consciously at his attentive crew, then nodded at his new belly gunner. “Fata morganas are a kind of mirage,” he said. “You see them under certain conditions in calm weather, when a layer of warm air sits on top of a layer of cold air. It acts like a lens. Sometimes they look like floating rocks just above the horizon.” Farley paused. “Or castles in the air.”

  Broben waggled his eyebrows. “Castles,” he said. “In the air.”

  “Say,” Shorty said in his best radio announcer voice, “you mean like a … flying fortress?”

  “Why, yes, sergeant, I mean exactly like a Flying Fortress. Clever, no?”

  “But why not call her Mirage?” asked Martin. “Everyone knows what a mirage is.”

  “A fata morgana’s a special kind of mirage,” said Captain Farley. “Technically, it’s a complex superior mirage.”

  “Ooh, you got the fancy flight school,” said Broben.

  “The one for smart pilots,” Farley agreed.

  “So where does the girl with the magic wand come in?” Martin persisted.

  “She’s a girl,” said Everett. “You need a reason?”

  “Morgan la Fay was a sorceress in King Arthur,” said Farley. “She was Arthur’s half sister.”

  Broben hooked a thumb at Farley. “College boy,” he explained. He mimed drinking tea with his pinky extended. “Lih-tra-choor, dontchoo know.”

  Farley nodded at the painting. “The Italians called her Fata Morgana. They named the mirages after her because they thought they were magic. Floating islands or castles that lured sailors to their death. Like the Sirens.”

  “Yeah, the air-raid sirens,” said Garrett.

  Martin squinted at the woman on the bomber. “So … she’s a sorceress … and a flying fortress … and a mirage?”

  Farley nodded. “You’ve got it.”

  Martin looked thoughtful as he rubbed near the hollow of his throat. His intensity made the men glance among themselves, but they said nothing. “The Lakota have Heyoka Winyan,” said Martin. “Thunder-Dreaming Woman. She carries lightning, and she’s a great healer. She speaks in a voice like thunder.”

  “Well, this dame’s gonna yell all over Germany when we take her up,” said Broben.

  “Fata Morgana,” Martin said again.

  Shorty nodded. “We weren’t all that nuts about it at first,” he said. He ducked his head apologetically at Farley. “But after the captain explained it, it was kind of hard to picture calling her anything else.”

  Martin nodded. “Names have power,” he said. He became aware that they were all looking at him and he spread his hands. “Hey, you don’t need my okay,” he protested. “I’m the new guy.”

  “Tomorrow’s our first time with her, too,” said Boney.

  “She’ll be a good ol girl,” said Wen.

  “Lady,” Broben countered.

  Garrett shrugged. “Girl, lady. I’m still gonna see how far I can get with her and still be friends.”

  Broben shook his head. “Sergeant Garrett,” he said, “you’re a hell of gunner. But you are one hundred percent barbarian.”

  Whatever Garrett replied was drowned out by the crew’s laughter.

  two

  Broben brought two mugs to the folding table and set one in front of Farley. “There you go,” he said as he sat down across from him. “Nice and warm like momma used to brew. Cheers.”

  They clinked glasses and drank. The Boiler Room was full tonight, loud with chatter and thick with cigarette smoke. Kay Kyser played on the Armed Services Radio from the lone PA speaker on the wall. Beneath it were pinups. Beside Veronica Lake a well-lettered sign read keep ’em flying! Groups of men, few in uniform, sat at folding tables or stood in clusters at the bar, talking shop and gesturing. It might have been a dive bar near a college somewhere, except there were no women, and the gestures weren’t what you’d see in a college bar: One hand held level and the other diving under it, then the leveled hand slowly angling out to turn palm-up. Two hands struggling with an invisible control wheel. Two fists jerking in time as they swiveled an imaginary .50-caliber machine gun. Though technically it was
an officers’ club, there were plenty of noncoms. A few men had beers, most drank warm soft drinks.

  Farley realized he could tell who was ground crew and who was flight crew without having to think about it. The flyers simply looked older. Dark circles under their eyes and a haunted, hunted look. They were nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Whatever boyhood they had carried with them into service had been shot, shaken, blasted, burned, belly-landed, and grieved completely out of them. The boy in them had bailed out somewhere over the English Channel on his first mission. He was missing and presumed dead.

  Farley knew that he didn’t look any different.

  Broben thumped his mug onto the table and wiped his upper lip and sighed. “Warm beer,” he mused. “I’m turning into a friggin Limey.”

  “They’re not so bad. They’ve been around a lot longer than we have.”

  “Yeah, yeah, they got socks older than us. I’ll admit they’re brave bastards.” Broben raised his mug. “Here’s to every milk-white one of ’em.”

  They toasted.

  “They can keep their damn weather, though,” Broben added.

  “How in the world are you going to go back to driving a delivery truck after all this?” Farley asked.

  “I ain’t no truck driver.”

  “I thought that’s what you did before you joined up.”

  “I’m more like a philosopher on wheels.”

  Farley snorted. “You’re something on wheels, all right.”

  They were quiet a moment. Now it was Jimmie Lunceford on the PA. Smells of tobacco and beer and sweat. Steady hubbub and coiled tension.

  “So what do you make of the Indian?” Broben asked.

  “He seems all right. Handled himself pretty well after I threw him to the wolves.”

  Broben nodded. “If he shoots like he pitches, he’ll clear us a path all the way to the IP.”

  “He was a ball gunner on another B-17,” Farley said carefully. “Had to bail out when they took hard flak.”

  Broben whistled. “Why didn’t they just hand his crew a new bird like they did with us?”

  “He is the crew.”

  “Oh.” The lieutenant nodded slowly. “That’s a lousy break.”

  “It is that.”

  They were quiet again. Both men thinking of so many who had been here so briefly. A sad parade of unremembered names and faces and truncated histories. To talk about them was to conjure ghosts, invite bad luck, dwell on whether that dread country they had entered lay in wait for you as well. It was not discussed.

  “So how’d a belly gunner make it out and nobody else?” Broben asked.

  “Have to ask him.”

  “I might just do that. What was his ship?”

  Farley took so long answering that Broben thought he hadn’t heard him. Then he said, “Ill Wind.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “That was his ship.”

  “Bull and shit. They were all dead on the Ill Wind.”

  “On her, yeah. He bailed.”

  “You’re telling me we got a guy from the Ill Wind on our brand-new bird.”

  “Yes, Jerry, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  Broben frowned. “That’s some bad juju, Captain Pilot sir.”

  “You sure you aren’t just getting the heebie jeebies about going up in a new boat?”

  Broben shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “You’d rather be on the Voice?”

  “Not on Hermann Göring’s worst day. That heap of shit was the best weapon Germany ever had. I miss her like I miss getting crabs.”

  Farley nodded. He had inherited the Voice of America after Henry Alan Logan had been killed by flak, but he had never warmed to her. More important, she had never warmed to him. Farley liked the idea of a clean slate when it came to the bomber.

  Broben leaned back in his folding chair. “So what happened on the Ill Wind?”

  “I think it’s better if Martin tells it. But go easy on the guy, Jer.”

  Broben waved as if shooing flies and glanced around the club. The pinups on the wall, a dartboard not in use, the men drinking and smoking and talking RPMs and pull-up speeds, hydraulic failures and flak patterns and Luftwaffe tactics. “So who’s the dame?” he asked.

  “What dame?”

  “The one you’re about to fly all over western Europe.”

  “I already explained who she is. The legend—”

  Broben raised his hands. “Spare me the King Arthur stuff, Joseph. You handed Shorty everything but a photograph to work with. Come on, give. Whose puss we got plastered on our bird?”

  “No one I know, I swear.”

  Broben studied him. “That’s not exactly a straight answer.”

  Farley shrugged. “It’s an answer.”

  The room went quiet. Frank Sinatra was suddenly loud on the wall-mounted speaker.

  Farley looked up to see Major Delvecchio standing in the doorway. He did not meet anybody’s gaze as he slowly raised a hand to touch his cap. He gave a little nod and then he left.

  Broben’s Well, shit seemed loud in the smoky room.

  Men quietly finished their drinks and slipped out into the cold English night.

  “Guess I better go join the conga line,” said Farley.

  “Why bother?” said Broben. “When haven’t we been on the assignment sheet? Better I should grill our ground guys.”

  “The Ordnance boys don’t know any more than we do.”

  “They may not know where we’re going,” said Broben, “but they know what we’ll be hauling there.”

  Farley nodded. “I’ll take what I can get,” he said.

  *

  The flight line was a hive of activity. Farley put his hands in his jacket pockets against the cold as he walked along the row of Nissen huts to the operations room. He watched service trucks speed out from the bomb storage depot to the bombers on their hardstands, headlights taped over so that only narrow slits of light showed. Ground crew rode on the bombs in back like kids on a hayride. One of them was playing a harmonica, and the tones bent flat as the truck receded.

  Farley tracked one service truck along the taxiway until it pulled up by the Fata Morgana. He nodded to himself. Ordnance would be assembling and loading bombs most of the night, and the ground crews would be working on the ships till dawn. They never seemed to sleep. Most of them had been mechanics before the war. Repairmen, some of them. They knew his bomber better than he ever would, and they worried themselves sick whenever their crate was out on a mission. Like parents loaning the car to a kid on his first date. They grilled you when you got back: How’d she do, what went wrong, how’d this or that repair hold up? And when ships didn’t come back they sat on their bicycles along the runway and stared up at the sky like some stone age tribe forlorn at their god’s abdication.

  At the Operations Room a knot of pilots was gathered by the door. Farley greeted them as he worked his way toward the assignment sheet on a clipboard hanging on a nail.

  In front of Farley, Hap Saunders turned away from the sheet in disgust. Hap was a scrawny little cuss who flew the Dollar Short. He shrugged at Farley. “Why don’t they just list who isn’t going?” he said. “It’d save a bunch of time.”

  “’Cause it’d be a blank sheet of paper,” said Hernandez, beside him. Hernandez flew Montezuma’s Revenge. As far as Farley knew, he was the only Latin-American pilot in the AAF. He nodded at Farley. “Ordnance tell you anything?” he asked.

  “My XO went to get the lowdown.”

  “I heard it’s mixed incendiaries and M44s.”

  “Munitions factory?” Farley wondered.

  “I’m thinking.”

  Hernandez hurried away with Saunders. Neither had mentioned whether he’d seen Farley on the list. You found your own name on the assignment sheet. And if your name wasn’t on it, you didn’t mention that, either.

  But of course it was there. Farley, Joseph M., Capt.

  They never listed the other crew. They knew they’d be going w
ith you.

  *

  A touch on the shoulder at 0430 brought Farley from a deep sleep on his cot in the officers’ barracks. He always slept well the night before a mission. He had no idea why. Most of the others tossed and turned and called out in their sleep—if they could get to sleep. Farley went out like a light and stayed that way. Broben said that Farley could sleep on a meathook.

  So when Staff Sergeant Boatman, the operations officer, came in quietly and went from cot to cot politely waking the officers on the mission roster—those who weren’t already awake, anyhow—Farley had to swim up from the bottom when his shoulder was shaken and his name softly called.

  “Morning, captain,” said Boatman. “Briefing at oh five-thirty. Enjoy your breakfast.” And then he was moving on to the next cot.

  Broben was already getting dressed when Farley sat up. “Shit, shower, and shave, Joseph,” Jerry said quietly.

  Farley blinked. “The service at this hotel has really gone downhill,” he said.

  Broben nodded. “New management. I hear there’s an outfit in Berlin interested in the property, though.”

  Farley rubbed his face, unfazed by the activity around him. “If there’s no coffee around here,” he said, “they can have it.”

  *

  The crowded jeep slowed down but did not stop as it went by the dark shape of the bomber in the predawn light. Martin, Garrett, Everett, Francis, and Shorty hopped off and shouldered their heavy Browning machine-gun barrels in their oily sleeves. They waved thanks to the driver, who sped off to collect the next crew. Garrett and Everett headed for the waist hatch, griping all the way. Their bright yellow mae wests flapped in the cold damp morning as the men heaved their parachute harnesses into the bomber and climbed in after. Francis went around to the other side, where he had his own little hatch at the rear of the aircraft for his tail gunner post.

  Wen Bonniker was already doing a walkaround with Case Miller, the ground crew chief. Wen was not a small man, but he looked tiny beside the stern, bull-like Bostonian with pant cuffs half a foot above his ankles and sleeves halfway up his forearms. Case had been a company truck mechanic before the war, and Wen nodded as the huge man pointed a thick finger at Number Four engine and gave a detailed account of its most recent service.