by Carrie Lofty
“That’s right.”
She hoisted her rigging. “Thank you, sir.”
“Be safe up there, Davies.”
Joe had said the same thing—Joe, who would forever remain a mystery. That knowledge didn’t sit well in her chest, like heavy, hot hands squeezing her ribs. Yet Joe had said it almost cynically. Perhaps his objections to her profession had colored even his farewell. That would be disappointing indeed. No matter how handsome and intriguing, a Yank like that would never respect her as Nicky did.
At the threshold of the office, a flash memory reminded her of what she still needed to do. She fished a pound note out of a tunic pocket. “Time to pay up.” She nodded to the little wooden coffin on Nicky’s desk, then tucked the note in the coin slot.
“Promise me. No more donations that expensive.”
She tossed him a smile and a salute. “Promise.”
Ten minutes later she was settled into the cockpit of her eight-passenger Anson and working through her preflight check: pitch, petrol, flaps, and down through the list. Four other pilots, including Betsy and an American named Lee Cooper, were strapped in. All wore parachutes. Some smoked. Some swallowed the last of their morning coffee or flipped through a newspaper.
For the next eight hours Lulu’s job would be to fill gaps in the roster. If a pilot needed to fly a Spitfire out of Castle Bromwich, he needed to get there in the first place. And at the end of the day, should another pilot be caught out in Lossiemouth without a ride, Lulu would fetch her back home. It was tedious work full of little hops in a dull machine.
But as the aircraft fired to life, a wash of déjà vu spun her vision. She imagined the ground hurtling up to meet her and the hideous squeal of the Hurricane’s propeller as it sheared away.
Enough.
The lives of four other pilots rested in her hands. Friends. People she had lived and worked with across more than two years at Mersley. She wasn’t going to let a few ghostly memories put them in jeopardy.
Ah, so that’s what he’d meant.
Thanks, Nicky.
She touched the gold wings embroidered on one corner of her blue RAF handkerchief. She tied it over her hair, took hold of the controls, and eased the Anson toward the runway. Two minutes later they were airborne—and the view.
She lived for that view.
“And then what?” Smitty asked.
Joe kicked the dirt off his boots and plopped down. When the wind rustled through the bare elm branches, he shivered. “I just said good night and left.”
“That’s it? Pearls before swine, my friend.” Smitty finished his cigarette and adjusted his webbed helmet. “You’re a stark-raving comedown, letting your girl go like that.”
“She’s not my girl, chowderhead.”
Never could be.
Her rejection still nettled him like a month-old flesh wound, something that shouldn’t still be paining him. She’d sought him out. And then she’d been ready to turn him down flat, even before his tangle with Dixon.
Of all the dumb luck, to wind up in the same division as Harry Dixon. The man had left their little hometown of North Shore, Indiana, to attend Purdue University. A veritable golden boy. But Joe knew better. Now that disgusting snake was educated. An engineer and an officer.
Fate was feeling mean.
And besides, he hadn’t missed the affection in her voice as she’d described her CO—that ritual about paying the undertaker. He didn’t feel jealous per se. But it was another reminder of the unnatural nature of women in the service. Clubs and other social locations were appropriate places for romance. Not air bases. How could that tension between man and woman simply be ignored?
“Well, that tasty Scottish nurse,” Smitty said, “she’s not my girl, either.”
Joe frowned. “No dice?”
“Zip. When she pouted and said something about needing to meet up with her sister, I knew I was cooked.”
Smitty stood up, his ears briefly backlit by the overcast sun. He looked like a pale human bat. Then he turned to three-quarter profile and Joe could nearly see what women liked about his boyish looks and carefree demeanor. Nearly.
A frosty rain sprinkled down from low-lying clouds. Across the field of rain-drenched scrub, the riflemen of Baker Company were completing a morning of target practice. Soon enough they’d be back in the woods for combat scenarios. Smitty still had money on France. Joe still couldn’t care less.
No, that wasn’t true. After the newsreel footage they’d seen of vicious hand-to-hand combat on the Marshall Islands, he was glad to be anywhere other than the South Pacific. The medics there had to battle typhus and jungle rot and a host of other tropical diseases, ones Joe had only heard about. His shiver had little to do with the chilly English rain.
He and Smitty were enjoying a few free minutes following their morning of medical drills. They’d played mad scientist on one another, working through one mock injury or illness after another. Joe had feigned shrapnel to the eye, pneumonia, and invasive wounds of varying severity to four parts of his body. In turn he’d diagnosed frostbite, gonorrhea, dehydration, and lead poisoning on Smitty, along with a trio of mortar and bullet wounds. They’d also reviewed proper technique for using a burn kit, hemostatic forceps, and plasma infusers.
The medics of his company and the twenty-four others in the 512th were so well prepared that their assigned duties clicked along. No questions. No foul-ups. Just men who knew their stuff. Joe could practically patch and repair in his sleep. But because so much of what he’d learned was becoming second nature, his attention had wandered. His fingers remembered the ridges of Lulu’s spine while his mind dared to imagine the weight and softness of her breasts.
He swallowed hard.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Smitty said. “The war’s gone and made all these English broads into teases. They get to slink about at all hours—which, back home, would mean a real good time waiting to get got.”
“With a certain kind of girl?”
“Sure. But these dames, they do all their dancing in the club, if you know what I mean. Then it’s a kiss on the cheek and thanks for the good time, soldier.”
“Is that all you got? A peck on the cheek? She seemed a little more willing than that.”
“Not a chance.” Smitty spit at the dirt. “I told you, a bunch of teases.”
Joe didn’t want to fall in with the skinny kid, but his pride and his high-strung body cried out a harmonious agreement. Lulu Davies was probably just an exotic, well-practiced hellcat who enjoyed pulling men along by their torpedoes.
“What’s the latest?” he asked. If anything could get Smitty off the topic of dames, it was the latest invasion rumors.
His friend’s eyes lit up. “You really want to know?”
“Sure.”
Smitty leaned in close. “Way I hear tell, we’re not even gonna bother with France. Just jump straight on Berlin.”
“What, and be surrounded in Nazi Germany? C’mon, Smitty. Talk sense.”
“How about that Gen. Gavin only ever expects two men to survive for every ten who jump?”
“Who told you that?”
“Some kid in Able Company.”
Joe wanted to protest. He could have, after all, because most rumors were as thin as cobwebs. But Smitty’s grim prediction clinched it for Joe. He was going to try and see Lulu again. If prison and the service had taught him anything, it was that life offered very few opportunities. Rarely had he been able to ask for what he wanted, let alone make demands. Lulu liked him, maybe even wanted him. It was high time he put a lid on his past and found some goddamn courage.
A harsh male scream split the wet English air. “Medic!”
Joe jumped up and ran.
Without thought he tore down the shallow slope that bordered the field, with Smitty’s footfalls hard on his heels. The riflemen had been on their bellies and facing away, firing at distant targets. Now many were bunched around a fallen man. Maybe someone had wandered into the line of fire? A ricoc
het?
“Medic!” came another bellow. “Over here!”
“That’s Banks,” he shouted back to Smitty. “First platoon. I got it.”
Joe stole home and came to a jostling stop beside Lt. Johnny Banks, the leader of first platoon. He was cradling what was left of Pvt. Pat McIntosh’s mangled hand. Three fingers were missing.
Time slowed. Joe scrutinized everything: torn ligaments, a white flash of bone, ruptured arteries, choked-off veins that found no blood to return to the heart. A scattering of metal fragments peppered the left side of the private’s face.
“Get his feet up,” Joe told Banks. “Shock position. And someone go for an ambulance!”
He pulled McIntosh’s protective arm away as Banks and another man elevated the private’s legs. They mumbled quieting words, but to Joe—and maybe to McIntosh, too, who moaned and thrashed with eyes as wide as a panicked horse—the words were only background noise. Joe’s concentration narrowed to his job.
Sulfa first. He yanked the personal wound packet out of McIntosh’s helmet webbing and unwrapped it. After dousing the area with white antibiotic powder, he splinted the remaining ring and pinkie fingers.
“Where’s the ambulance?” he asked Banks. That calm, steady voice couldn’t be his, not with how his guts twisted and his breath huffed like a train gaining speed. But it was.
“No sign,” said the lieutenant.
Glancing up, Joe found that he had an audience. Members of first platoon stood nearby, their faces strained with helpless concern. Joe felt oddly lucky that, in such a moment of impotence and confusion, he knew what to do.
“Fergus, Jenkins, shoulder your rifles and prepare to move McIntosh. Sir,” he said to Banks, “help me with this.”
The lieutenant stilled McIntosh’s twitching hand while Joe wound the bandage and tied a butterfly knot. Wiping his forehead, Joe noticed the fingers lying in the dirt. He scooped them up and kept them out of McIntosh’s sight, wrapping them in the wax lining that had encased the bandage. It was the closest he had to sterile—not that he held out much hope.
With the bleeding stopped, Joe pulled a syrette of morphine out of his cardboard box of five. He pushed the plunger into the hollow needle to break the seal, then stabbed the needle into the bicep opposite McIntosh’s wound. It emptied like a tiny tube of toothpaste. Relief flooded the soldier’s ashen, sweat-drenched face. His eyes went soft and distant, his shoulders sagging against Banks’s knees. Joe used the blood on his hands to mark an M for morphine on his patient’s forehead.
Two privates—Gage Fergus, the stout son of Irish emigrants to Boston, and Freddie Jenkins, who hailed from the deep Everglade swamps—stood ready to bear their brother-in-arms. They gingerly lifted McIntosh to his feet and hauled his arms over their shoulders, helping him walk. Joe completed an EMT. The skin between his fingers kept sticking as he gripped the stubby pencil.
A siren wailed in the distance.
“Leave room for the ambulance,” Joe ordered. “Make a path.”
If he thought about how many people jumped to fulfill his every order, he’d fall straight over. He was a private, for God’s sake. But the red cross he wore made him more than that. It was a responsibility and an element of command he hadn’t considered. He’d never considered how good it would feel, either.
He threw his shoulders back and pointed to a patch of relatively dry field grass where the ambulance could park without getting stuck. Fergus and Jenkins arrived with their wounded burden. Joe pushed sweat-slicked hair back from McIntosh’s temples. “Pat, do you hear me? Pat?” When he received no reply, he summoned his best impression of a drill sergeant. “Private! Look at me.”
Bleary blue eyes fought to focus.
“You did real good, Pat,” Joe said, gentling his voice. “You’re gonna be fine. Take it easy now.” The ambulance arrived in a hail of mud and cut its wailing siren. No matter how good or how strong that responsibility had felt, Joe was relieved to hand his patient over to real doctors. “See? The MDs will take care of you now. You hang in there.”
He watched as the litter bearers loaded McIntosh into the back of the ambulance.
As it sped away, Banks clapped Joe on the shoulder. “Good work, Doc.”
He’d been Pvt. Weber through all of basic training and jump school—or worse yet “goldbrick,” the name leveled at medics, chaplains, certain officers, and anyone else seen as not pulling a rifleman’s weight. But suddenly he was Doc. Maybe their proximity to danger made it more important to believe he could save lives.
“Thanks, sir. What happened?”
“Rifle backfire. A round jammed in the barrel and blew up in his hand.” The lieutenant wiped blood on his olive drab uniform. Otherwise, his ODs were spotless. “Damn shame.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
From across the range Capt. Crowly shouted to the men. “Baker Company! Round ’em up! We’ve got lunch in ten!”
“You mind if I skip lunch, sir?” Joe had never asked anything of his platoon leader, but this was important. His mind was jammed with bright, grisly images. “I need a smoke and a walk.”
Banks pulled his lower lip in over his teeth, a grimacing expression he wore when he was thinking. He was a movie producer’s son, a regular swell with looks and dough to spare, but he was also one of those rare, respected officers who actually knew what he was doing. “Take what time you need. I’ll clear it with Capt. Crowly.”
“Thank you, sir.”
And then their association fell back into place. Banks resumed the organization of his men, while Joe sorted his aid bag, pulled his Zippo out of his breast pocket, and lit a cigarette. Unexpectedly, as the company came together via the chain of command, he found himself accepting handshakes and murmured words of praise. The platoon’s subdued appreciation eased over him, blunting the worst of the aftermath.
With a deep breath he fell into formation and marched with Baker Company toward the mess hall. He might not be able to eat, but he no longer felt the need to be alone.
chapter five
Lulu stood outside of the Leicester Cinema, her apprehension growing by the minute. “Paulie, I’m not sure about this.”
“Don’t worry,” Paulie said, practically bouncing up and down with anticipation. “It’s only one night. That’s in keeping with your philosophy about servicemen, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but generally I know the chap before I spend an evening with him in a darkened theater.”
“Unlike Paulie,” Betsy chimed in.
Paulie stuck out her tongue, then returned to Lulu. “Besides, aren’t you eager to celebrate?”
“That I am.”
Based on her testimony alone, she’d cleared the Accidents Committee’s inquisition without issue. Nicky hadn’t needed to speak on her behalf, although his presence had done much to keep her calm and rational.
Yet her mind was never calm, never rational. Three weeks had passed since she’d plowed that Hurricane into the airstrip at Wymeswold. Forgoing her staunch rules, she still hadn’t been able to shake Joe Weber.
Lulu twirled a lock of hair. She was in uniform, as always, but a skirt, stockings, and low patent leather pumps made the fact she was going on a blind date even more apparent. To distract herself she watched a pair of RAF officers across the street. Leaning against the wall of a bakery that had closed for the night, the men passed a cigarette back and forth, sharing the puffs equally. She smiled at such an amicable picture of rationing. Faded playbills for an all-girl orchestra fluttered above their heads like a dozen black-and-white handkerchiefs. A giant U.S. Army truck lumbered down the thoroughfare, honking to disperse pedestrians. The RAF officers had moved on by the time the truck passed.
“I hope he doesn’t expect too much,” she said, almost to herself. “I’m here to take in a picture show and keep him company, not suffer through an evening-long bodily assault.”
Betsy snickered. “Then you’re not thinking realistically.”
“Cool down,” Paulie
said. “Whoever he is, I’m sure he won’t be so rude as to harbor expectations. Smitty said his friend simply doesn’t have a date.”
“So it’s Smitty now?” Betsy’s smile teased like the Cheshire Cat. “You’re a one-woman USO, Paulie dear.”
“I do my bit for king and country.”
“And for the Allied forces, too,” Lulu added.
“But I don’t want some lonesome soldier cluttering up one-on-one time with my new chap.” Paulie took a folding mirror and her nearly empty tube of lipstick out of her handbag. “And you, Louise. You don’t have a date. Problem solved. Just recall what it’s worth to you and you can thank me later.”
In return for this favor, Paulie—who never cared much one way or the other about flying new aircraft—had promised to take her name out of the running for the four-engine training spots. Paulie also knew Evelyn Wambaugh from her days at Hatfield. Lulu, you’ve never met a pilot more resembling a timid little mouse. Now one of the spots at Marston Moor was sure to go to Lulu. All she had to do was spend the evening with a man she’d never met. Not too difficult, actually. She spent most of her free evenings that way.
Lulu smiled. Yes, this would work out fine.
While they waited outside the cinema for the men to arrive, Lulu glanced at the crowd milling around the ticket office. So many Americans. She wondered, once they’d won the war, if the sight of Yankees in khaki and olive drab would actually become a thing of the past. Not even the most provincial little hamlets had been left unaffected by the boys’ favorite reminders of home—Betty Grable and Esquire, Lucky Strikes and the jive. Would England miss all that joyous, uncouth energy?
And irony of ironies, would she miss the freedom the war had provided? Every day she worked toward Allied victory was a day she took flying for granted. That privilege was unlikely to survive peacetime.
Skirting the impulse to borrow trouble, Lulu studied individual men. She found such a variety, with freckles, mustaches, tan skin, beanpole bodies, ginger hair, even wrinkles. Their only commonality was some manner of service uniform.
