by Janet Dailey
When bare to the waist, he stood up to loosen his pants. Walker noticed Mary Lynn standing silently by the window. He paused, searching her still features. He tipped his head to the side. “Is something wrong?”
She looked toward the door, a drift of self-consciousness running across her face. “That desk clerk knew when we registered that we weren’t man and wife, didn’t he?”
“I doubt that he cared one way or the other as long as we paid for the room.” His shoulder lifted in a vague shrug. “What does it matter anyway?”
“I suppose it doesn’t.” Her glance fell. “But the way he looked at us … it made this something … sordid and cheap.”
And the situation wasn’t improved by his behavior, Walker realized—undressing as if he were bedding a common whore. He silently cursed his thoughtlessness and went to her, gently turning her from the window to face him.
“You’re wrong, Little One.” He urgently pressed his feelings on her. “You’re much too beautiful and fine to be sullied by any of this.” He heard the high-sounding words as he spoke them, so deeply sincere. Coming from him, they seemed out of character. He chuckled in his throat and stroked the hollow below her ear lobe. “I sound so damned noble, don’t I? But it’s the truth.”
She gazed at him, a hint of regret in her velvet dark eyes. “I’m not as good as you think I am, Walker.”
Slowly he accepted these words as true; otherwise she wouldn’t be in this hotel room with him. At the moment, it didn’t matter whether she was sinking to his level or he was rising to hers. In some decent part of his mind, he realized she’d never done this before.
Gently, he led her away from the window and held her face in his hands while he kissed it with slow, seeking ardor. As her stiffness and discomfort melted, he began to undress her, taking time to caress the areas he uncovered before moving on to the next. There were hungers to be satisfied, the taste of her skin beneath his tongue and the feel of her hard nipples under his thumb. Her hands were splayed across his chest and the heavy thud of his heart beat against them.
Long-held desires heated their flesh and quickened their breathing. When she was stripped of clothes and all the restraints of society’s conventions, Walker swung her feet off the floor and carried her to the bed.
Here they were merely participants in the most basic of all acts—no more than a man and a woman discovering ways they fit together that gave them pleasure, glimpsing old glories made new and sensing some of the wonder so fleetingly possessed—and always the straining for more.
Part IV
We wanted wings,
Then we got those goldarned things
They just darned near killed us,
That’s for sure.
They taught us how to fly
Now they send us home to cry
’Cause they don’t want us anymore.
You can save those AT-sixes
To be cracked up in the ditches,
For the way the Army flies
Really clears them out of the skies.
We earned our wings,
Now they’ll clip the goldarned things
How will they ever win the war?
Chapter XXVII
THE BEDSHEET WAS drawn tightly across her breasts and firmly tucked under her arms to keep it in place. Mary Lynn couldn’t explain it, even to herself, this need to hide her body. Surely not from Walker—his invasion of her had been most complete … and satisfying. Was that it? Had she wanted it not to be as good as it had been with Beau?
The raw sweet pleasure was all gone and her feelings were getting twisted inside. The cigarette she was smoking lost its flavor and she turned on her side to crush it in the ashtray on the bedstand. When she rolled back, Mary Lynn was conscious of Walker, his head turned on the pillow to look at her. A ravel of smoke from his cigarette drifted in the air above them. The hard and knowing mockery in his eyes was difficult to meet.
“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” A faint harshness crept into the edges of his voice.
“Who?” Mary Lynn pretended obtuseness.
“Don’t play games, Little One.” Some kind of anger made him sit up and swing around to the side of the bed, where he reached for the rum bottle and poured some into a glass. “Your husband, of course.” He bolted down a swallow of liquor, then made a study of the glass. “That nagging sense of shame and guilt won’t last. It’ll pass like everything else, until the next time, when the urge strikes again.”
“How do you know?” she demanded, angry that he had somehow gotten into her head as well as her body.
Walker turned to look across his shoulder. His mouth crooked in a humorless line. “Because I’ve been there, my love.” He reached backwards to stroke her cheek and cup it in a gentle fashion before turning away. “I’ve been there.” The glass was tipped again to his mouth.
One lamp illuminated the room, throwing out shadows from its single pool. When Walker lifted an arm, the dim light cast a rippling sheen over the bare flesh stretched tautly across the muscles in his back. His body was marked with scattered dull-red scars. Flesh wounds, she supposed they were called. They weren’t old ones, but recently incurred. It would take a long time before the reddened scars would fade to rose-brown and finally to white.
“Don’t lose any sleep over it,” Walker advised her. “He won’t. Many other things may rob him of sleep, but not the comfort of a body’s arms. He might feel a twinge of guilt once in a while—maybe when she does something that reminds him of you. Is that what I did?” His head turned, his glance sliding to her. “Remind you of him?”
At times she could despise him for his brutal honesty; no subject was sacred; no topic was discreetly avoided. Worse, perhaps, he preyed on her doubts about Beau.
“You’re not like him.”
“Aren’t I?” he mused, but let it pass.
“You don’t even know Beau.” Mary Lynn didn’t know why she persisted in the subject, unless it was some kind of punishment. “You’re only guessing about the women.”
“He’s a man, isn’t he?” There was a rising heat in his voice, impatient and hard. “What’s any man want when he’s thirsty? If he’s far from home, he’ll drink from the well that’s close by. Maybe he’ll miss the taste of the sweet water back home but he’ll drink to satisfy the craving inside. That’s just the way it is. Maybe that’s why we’re made of clay, because the impulses that drive us are dirt-common.”
“I never guessed you were a philosopher.” She was calmed by the things he said, but it seemed strange to hear him speaking in Beau’s defense, offering justification for his infidelity. Or was he giving reasons for her own? Or his?
“It must be the war.” Walker stared into the glass as if it held the answer. “At first, you try to understand the whys of it, but it’s such insanity that none of it will tolerate a close scrutiny. So you either go on with blind faith in the people supposedly leading you or else you turn to the bottle and drink until it’s all a blur and none of it matters.”
“What’s it like?” It had done things to him, things she didn’t understand. And she wondered if all the bomber pilots returning home would be like Sam Walker.
“Hell.” A long silence followed the one-word reply while Walker was caught up in his own thoughts. Then he roused himself to go on, in a flat, emotionless voice. “It isn’t like what they write about or what they show you on the screen. In the movies, you see the enemy, whether he’s a yellow-skinned Jap or a strong-jawed Jerry. Man fighting man is an honorable thing; there’s glory in it. But you aren’t fighting men; you’re fighting machines. There lies the horror of this war. The side with more and better machines is going to win.”
“It can’t be that simple.”
“Why?” He turned to challenge her with certainty. “Because we’ve got ‘right’ on our side? Because we’re better than they are? Or braver or stronger? It will be because we’ve got raw material and factories that can throw out tanks and airplanes almost as fas
t as their machines can shoot them down.”
Looking away, she resisted the things he was saying. “Don’t you think we have a cause … a reason to fight?”
“Yes.” A sigh took the anger from him and left the bitterness. “Yes, we have to fight, but do we have to lose so much? When we come back from raids over German territory, our generals don’t count our losses in lives. It’s planes—how many machines did we lose?
“They order us up there—maybe twenty formations of sixty bombers each. They fill the sky.” He was staring sightlessly into the room, the drink clenched tightly in his hand. “Overhead, the fighters ride escort, but not for long. Before their fuel runs low, they’ll turn around and we’re left at the mercy of … they have no mercy. They’re waiting for you, though. They know you’re coming and they wait—with their fighters and their flak. But you keep flying. When those German Focke-Wulfs pounce on you, you keep flying. There’s no breaking off course to engage the enemy. You’ve got a target to reach and a bombload to drop and you just pray that none of those rockets flaming from their fighter planes hits your Fortress.
“And all the while, the intercom is alive with warnings—shoutings of the crew calling in your ears … your own voice among them … telling each other of planes diving toward your ship. Explosions all around you, and the thud of bullets tearing through metal … and the sickening feel of the ship when you know she’s been hit, but you can’t tell how bad. You just try to keep her in the air and on course for the target—always on course. You can’t fall out of formation. A crippled bomber is a sitting duck, and the fighters will be on it like a pack of wolves.”
Beads of sweat were breaking out on his forehead but Mary Lynn felt chilled by the terror in his images. “They come at you with black crosses painted on their wings, shooting their cannon shells. You see other bombers take hits, engines flame out, tiny lances of fire licking close to fuel tanks, black smoke pouring from an engine. A Fortress wings over and you’ll watch the pilot fight to bring her out of the dive and back to straight and level so the crew can bail out before she blows. Maybe you know them, maybe you don’t, but you’ll count parachutes and yell for that tenth one to come out.
“Not always, though. Sometimes, nobody bails out. They ride her down, and you know why. One of the crew’s hurt, or a parachute is shot to rags, and the guys won’t leave one of their own behind, so all the fools will die.” His teeth were bared now, the words pushed through them while a wetness shimmered in his eyes, all hot and bitter. “Then you watch the German fighters zero in on the parachutes, and you see guys jerking frantically on the shroud lines trying to dodge the bullets streaming at them. Or the ones whose parachutes are on fire and they have a mile to think about the way they’re going to die.
“And that’s just the fighters,” he said savagely. “With them, the guys had something to shoot at. But the flak is different. The German artillery’s got your range and altitude. They sit on the ground and throw fire at us, peppering the sky with their explosions until the air turns gray-black. Mile after mile, the deeper into Germany you fly, the thicker it gets. More bombers drop out of formation, some blowing up in an intense ball of light and others too damaged to fly on. But the rest of you go on to the target.
“Once you get there and drop the eggs in your bomb bays, you turn for home. And you’ve gotta fly through that hell again. Chances of coming through it without a scratch are nil. Your plane will have taken a hit, maybe not a bad one. Or one of your crew will be hurt, maybe a scratch or maybe serious. You wait for the fighter protection to pick you up on your way home, and maybe there’ll be a little smile when you see the English Channel ‘cause you’ve beat the odds again.”
Walker half turned to look at her lying on the soft, soft bed. She wanted to cry when she saw his stark expression, but fear had her by the throat. She was frightened by his brutal view of the war.
“But that isn’t the real hell, Little One. It isn’t the air raids, the flight to the target and back. No. The hell is knowing you have to do it again and again. It isn’t just once that you go there. It’s over and over and over. And your chances of coming back alive dwindle every time until finally you know you’re a dead man. So how can they kill you when you’re already dead?”
“No.” The awful coldness that came with fear drove Mary Lynn from beneath the covers and against the warmth of his body as she wrapped herself around him, hugging to the living fire.
His words made death seem close, and she wanted to live. It was this instinct that made their urges so strong. Mating was an integral part of procreation—and procreation promised survival. People could live on in their children. Thus, it was not so strange that fear created an aroused sexuality, that before battle, man sought out woman or woman sought out man.
And if two people also found solace and a measure of human warmth in each other’s arms, they were that much luckier.
Later, while Mary Lynn slept, Walker stared at the ceiling, one muscled arm flung over his head. He dragged on a smoke and nursed another shot of rum. The pint bottle was nearly empty. His glance wandered to her, her face framed by the dark background of her hair. He remembered the soft black of her eyes, so bottomless and compelling.
He wondered what it was a man searched for in a woman’s eyes—what did he hope to see? He’d wanted her, he’d had her, but he still wasn’t satisfied. What was wrong with him that he couldn’t be happy with what he had? Maybe there was nothing beyond the pleasure of her body for the short time it lasted. Or could they make something that would last longer?
Bitterly, he took another swallow of rum. Many times over Germany, he’d breathed the acrid smell of brimstone. He’d lived in that hell and brought it home with him. It had blackened him and left him thirsty for the good things. But when you lived in hell, how could you expect to hear angels sing?
Again, he looked at her, with a wanting so deep inside him that he wanted to cry. He’d known the rough and wonderful excitement of her giving passions, and his envy of the love she held in reserve for her husband grew immense. It was not easy to take what he could have without wanting more.
Tears ran down her cheeks as Marty stood on the front porch of her parents’ Michigan home and stared at the gold star on the service flag in the window. A gold star for the death of a soldier son. Oddly, its presence seemed to make David’s death more real.
Beyond the windowpane a figure moved; Marty wiped at the wetness on her face and crossed to the front door. She entered the house as her father walked into the foyer. Grief had aged him, bowing his shoulders and draining the life from his stern features. It took him a minute to recognize her in her official summer dress uniform of tailored jacket and skirt in Santiago blue.
“Martha,” he said, somewhat uncertainly.
“I came as soon as I could, Dad.” She hugged him, seeking solace and finding a mechanical response in the arms that went around her. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“There’s nothing you can do.” He sounded so blank, like someone lost who didn’t care about being found. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”
Despite the brilliant June sunshine, a dark gloom prevailed inside the house. Marty felt it as she drew back from her father. There was a suffocating stillness in the air as though nothing lived here anymore.
A small noise came from the living room and Marty turned to see her mother, dressed all in black, framed in its archway. “Did you tell her?” Althea Rogers said to her husband. “They aren’t even sending his body home to us. They buried it in France. So far away.”
Without once looking at Marty, she turned and walked back into the living room. Marty was left standing alone as her father followed after her tragically forlorn mother. She trailed behind him. When she entered the living room, her attention was claimed by a black-draped photograph of David sitting by itself on a table. Marty felt immediately that she was standing before a shrine.
Her parents sat close together on the couch near the photograph. Her father h
ad a consoling arm around her mother’s shoulders while they gazed at the picture. Marty had the awkward feeling that she was intruding as she sat in the armchair across from them. Everywhere she looked there were mementos of David—a photo album, a scrapbook, his bronzed baby shoes.
“Did we tell you what happened?” Tears shimmered in her father’s eyes.
“No,” she said softly, huskily.
“He was killed trying to save a buddy who was wounded. He was trying to pull him to safety when a sniper shot him. He was killed instantly.” That seemed to comfort her physician father.
“Some place called Mézières.” Her mother picked up the world atlas lying on the table, opened to a map of France. “It’s located here.” She pointed to one of a hundred dots on the Cotentin Peninsula, and Marty dutifully looked. “He was such a good boy—so brave.”
“We can be very proud of him, Althea,” her father stated. “He’s been recommended for decoration by his company.”
Marty looked at them, surrounded by the mementos and the black-draped photograph of David, and realized how wrong she had been to think they would need her. She had never been able to compete with her brother when he was alive; she could never hope to win against him now that he was a dead hero.
It was a lonely bitter weekend, during which Marty did her grieving for her brother in private. She would miss him, too, but her parents never seemed to consider that. She was glad when she climbed back onto the train to head back to California.
When she arrived at the WASPs’ barracks, she noticed Mary Lynn’s room was locked. “Anybody know when Mary Lynn’s due back?” she asked the handful of WASPs lounging about the common room.
There was a general shrugging of shoulders until one of them suggested, “You could ask Captain Walker. He might know.”
