by Jim Shepard
Bryant when he reflected on it later found the story haunting for the same reason Lewis found it funny: the notion of retribution out of all proportion.
He sat alone in the day room afterwards with some V-mail from Lois. As Nissen huts went, this one was larger and more dismal than most. He sat in a battered easy chair but the corrugated metal walls made the whole thing feel like a construction site. Higher up they were covered with pin-ups no one liked enough to steal, and the pictures were torn and dirty from constant pawing. There was a wooden table next to his easy chair with a lamp on it and a tray of ancient doughnuts. The undersides of the doughnuts were furred with mold.
The day room had been set up for the aircrews’ leisure, and was looked upon by everyone as the nearest thing to a last resort. Bryant spread the letter before him and concentrated on an image of Lois, his high school girlfriend. He saw her on his parents’ sofa, laughing at the radio. He reread the letter.
I guess it must seem strange to you sitting where you are reading this thinking about me and where I am. I’m on Fox near the water, where the railroad bridge goes over. It’s a beautiful day tho it’s been raining lots lately. The war seems very far away and very close at the same time. Everyone’s very excited and pulling and praying for you. Your uncle Tom says you’re probably an ace by now, and your father said he read about a guy who shot his foot off cleaning his guns. (Can you be an ace on a bomber?)
I’m glad you have a dog, because I think they’re good company. Even if you have to share them. It’s too bad that the dog can’t see. I guess you’re a Seeing-Eye person. Your father says he didn’t know you could have dogs. I didn’t tell him what you said about your friend taking a squirrel up in the plane with him because I don’t believe you and that’s that.
Lewis claimed that he had had a squirrel, Beezer, trained to eat out of his hands—the little son of a bitch would sit there like Arthur Treacher, he’d say—and that it had flown two lowlevel missions with him toward the end of his first tour. According to Lewis, at altitude the animal skittered all through the fuselage, its feet sounding like light hail on the aluminum. It showed up on the co-pilot’s shoulder and nearly scared him to death. A rat! he’d screamed over the interphone. Jesus Christ, we got rats! He’d been reassured by the pilot and an amused bombardier that it was no rat, judging by the tail, but he’d cursed throughout the flight to the target that he’d wet himself because of the goddamned thing and that it was probably eating through the control cables right then, while he was talking. Ever see the teeth on those bastards? he kept saying. They were all sitting there laughing, he insisted over the interphone, and pfffft—right through the cables, and into the drink the hard way. They’d bombed some marshaling yards in Holland and Beezer had never been seen again.
Beezer, Lewis liked to theorize, had done a flying one and a half out of the bomb bay. Some Nazi manning an antiaircraft battery got it right in the face. He would mimic the plummeting Beezer, arms outspread, snarling. He speculated on the aerodynamics of the tail. He said, You think anyone’s going to know what he did? We’re talking about unsung heroes here.
So what’s new?
There’a a young boy with the government that moved into the third floor of the Duffy’s (very mysterious) and everyone’s wondering what’s up. All the girls are wild about him. But you don’t have anything to worry about as you KNOW.
Everyone we talk to is thrilled when we say we have a boy in the service. The poor girls who don’t are so left out. People say that’s our part—find a boy, write him letters, maybe even get engaged. Mom says maybe they figure you’ll fight even harder and do a better job if you’ve got someone in mind you’re fighting for. How did I get on to that subject?
Bryant folded the letter and got up. He sighed, and went outside. Lewis was breaking plates over his head.
They made a curious and fragile wooden sound and separated easily into a rain of pieces, like clay pigeons. Snowberry was handing him plates from a tea service, and one by one he was breaking them over his head. Crockery pieces bounced and ticked off the pavement.
“Isn’t it great?” Snowberry said. Bean and Piacenti were standing behind Lewis. “Lewis found all this stuff in the village. He got it all for nearly nothing. Some woman had lost her sons and was selling like everything she owned just right out in front of her house. Flipped. The neighbors were trying to talk her out of it and everything.” He gestured at a small heap of plates and teapots, cups and platters. Lewis broke another and a piece ricocheted a startling distance. It struck Bryant again how young Snowberry was: the same age as Lois’s little brother. He had a fleeting image of Lois’s brother in a B-17, like a boy allowed to sit in the gunner’s seat at a country fair.
“What’s it all worth?” he asked.
“Who knows?” Snowberry said. “You think they give away good china for peanuts around here?”
“Old hell-for-leather Bryant,” Lewis said. “He’d like to be a better gunner, but he knows what the bullets cost.”
“Hey, I’m just asking,” Bryant said. “You guys would piss on your mom’s Sunday clothes.”
“With Mom still in them,” Lewis said. “She used to warn us about that.”
“They sure break good, though, don’t they?” Piacenti said. “Whatever they’re made of.”
“It’s a funny gag,” Bryant said.
“He did it to me, too,” Bean said. “I thought he was gonna crack my skull.”
“I am gonna crack your skull,” Lewis said.
Bean shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I never know when he’s kidding or not,” he complained. Bean seemed to want to believe that the natural order of things was harmony, that conflict came from misunderstanding. His father had run for selectman with the slogan BEAN: I’TS LIKE BEING ELECTED YOURSELF.
“You gotta watch out, Bean,” Piacenti said. “He’s out to get you.”
Bean nodded unhappily, half convinced.
Lewis did seem to have it in for Bean, and no one knew why. It was an instinctual thing, it appeared; pure schoolyard.
“I’m Bean’s personal bogie,” Lewis said. “His own bandit. In the cloud, out of the sun. Whenever he lets his guard down.”
“I should talk to Lieutenant Gabriel,” Bean said. “I don’t see how we’re supposed to work together.”
Lewis shouted and jumped on him. Bean shrieked and Lewis drove them both into the crockery pile. The others laughed and a cup skittered edgewise like a top across the hardstand. Lewis held a teacup to the crown of Bean’s head like a tiny dunce cap, and Bryant laughed, grateful to have been spared the humiliation.
“Leave him alone, Lewis,” he said. As they shifted, the crockery made musical sounds beneath their weight. “Aren’t we a little old for this?”
“Listen to George Arliss,” Lewis snorted. “A year out of high school under his belt. And Strawberry, not even old enough to have a fight.”
“I prefer other forms of contact, if that’s what you mean,” Snowberry said.
“I’m trying to toughen this crew up,” Lewis said. “I know I’m doing the right thing. Bean knows that, even if you don’t. Right?” He glared down at Bean.
“It’s pretty clear to me,” Bean said. Lewis got off him.
“You’re the oldest,” Bryant said. “You should set an example.”
“I am,” Lewis said. “I’m getting pretty tired of you guys not picking it up.” About them as a crew he often said, The third time is no charm, boy, stressing the endless ways they did not, as raw rookies, measure up to his first two crews. He particularly had loved his original pilot, a man named Sewell he described as an “ace tyro,” who flew their plane with a tender, sad care. “Some of these guys, they wrestle and fight the thing,” he liked to say. “Sewell, he understood what I call Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal.” Sewell had been killed in a manner Lewis did not volunteer information on.
He pointed at Snowberry, whose mouth was slightly open in childish concentratio
n, as if he were going to sneeze. “This is what I’m talking about,” he said. He twiddled a cup grimly. “We’re going after the best air force in the world, on their own ground. They don’t have tours—you stay on till you get killed. Makes for guys who are real good. And real unhappy. Which makes them mean. They go head to head with Gordon Snowberry, Jr., here.”
“God help them,” Snowberry said.
“We’re the best Air Corps in the world,” Piacenti said. “Aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Lewis said. “Listen, you fire eaters. I’m not taking on Bean without help, next time. You and you are going to help me.” He pointed at Snowberry and Bryant.
“Come on, you guys,” Bean said.
Lewis tucked in his shirt. A cup handle hung from his belt loop. “My old football coach used to tell the defense, ‘Boys, I want you to show up in groups of two or more and arrive in a bad humor.’”
“You’re not funny, Lewis,” Bean said. “I hope you know that.”
“I appreciate the thought,” Lewis said.
After he left, Bean stood amid the crockery uncertainly, as if it had been his fault. He was an affable and quiet boy who closed his eyes when chewing his food, and Bryant liked him generally.
“Don’t worry, Bean,” he said. “He’ll find someone else.” He joined the rest of the crew, though, in being more or less satisfied that the abuse was centered mostly on Bean.
Snowberry said, “The thing about Lewis that’s hard to keep in mind is that he doesn’t have any good points.”
“I know he’s just kidding,” Bean said. He seemed to doubt it.
At mess Bryant suggested to Lewis he lay off.
Lewis opened his mouth and displayed some masticated food and then looked away. Bryant felt that he’d disappointed him.
“What’re you going to tell me?” Lewis asked. “‘Dislike May Split a Crew’?” It sounded harsher than Bryant would have liked, and he turned away, embarrassed. That had been pretty much what he had been planning to say.
“You think that’s stupid?” he eventually said, trying to sound assertive. Lewis was on his second tour and the rest of the crew regarded that amount of experience and the decision to reenlist with nearly equal awe.
“He’s not any good,” Lewis said. “He’s helpless as a gunner and as a radio op he couldn’t pick up the BBC.”
“He’ll be all right,” Bryant suggested.
“Look,” Lewis said. “I’m flying with him. I can’t teach him his job. I can teach him he’s not all he should be.”
“That’s a nice thing to teach someone,” Bryant said.
“I like to do it,” Lewis said. “My pleasure.”
Bryant felt chilled. He saw himself as no more competent than Bean was.
“Remember the kid from Idaho?” Lewis said. “Navigator? They figure now he thought he had the plane over the North Sea, by his figuring. Told the pilot to get down under the cloud, if he could, to look around. Only they were over Wales. Mountains.”
“He got mixed up,” Bryant said.
“Yes he did,” Lewis said. “Anatomically.”
Bryant ate, intimidated.
“Let me tell you something,” Lewis said. “We don’t have mistakes on Paper Doll. I don’t allow them. I personally don’t allow them. If Gabriel won’t make a thing about this, I will. You make a mistake, it’s your ass on a stick, and I’ll put it there. And you look like you make plenty of mistakes.” He turned his head, and Bryant after a pause stuck out his tongue. “We make a mistake, we’re dead. You make a mistake, we’re dead. Bean makes a mistake, we’re dead. Ten people. You figure it out. Keep that in mind. There are no excuses. Some Nazi flies up our ass because I’m daydreaming in the tail, I’m going to get on the interphone and go, ‘My goof’?”
Bryant had a headache, around the eyes. It seemed his training every step of the way, from high school all the way to England, had been inept and incomplete. His number one goal in high school had been to avoid humiliation—not excel, not learn, not stand out, simply avoid humiliation—and he was distressed to have learned that things hadn’t changed in the Army. He was more frightened of Lewis than of the Germans, and Lewis knew it and used it. Bryant knew nothing. In high school history his senior year they had spent a week coloring in the countries of Europe—blue for France, black for Germany, cross-hatching for the conquered areas—and his Germany Proper had stretched from Normandy to Leningrad. His teacher had held the paper up to ridicule in front of the class. His high school English teacher had shown three weeks of sketches she’d done of the Acropolis and then had tested them on Greek tragedy, and he’d gotten a 17 as a score, on a scale of 1-100. At the bottom of the test he’d written, “Nice sketches,” and she on the report card that went home that fall wrote, “Non-constructive and childish attitude.” He’d seen her on the street a week before he left and she’d congratulated him on becoming an American Eagle, and he’d said, “Why don’t you shut up?”, wishing he’d had a wittier rejoinder.
Lewis took Bryant’s roll and smoothed whitish margarine onto it with a finger. “Ah, we were as bad as you are,” he said. “Worse. We were cockier. We used to shout, ‘You’ll be sor-ry!’, at incoming crews. You get over that fast.”
“Not funny,” Bryant said.
Lewis leaned dangerously far back in his chair. “I’m in love with Gene Tierney,” he said. “I’ve got it bad, and that ain’t good. We’ve got this afternoon to kill. Any ideas?”
Bryant shook his head, and Lewis pulled a small assemblage of leather straps out of his pocket, and unfolded it. It looked like a small and complex muzzle.
After a moment of silence Lewis said, “It’s a cat harness.”
Bryant went on looking to indicate he needed more information.
“I’m thinking about organizing a cat throw,” Lewis said. “You interested?”
Bobby Bryant shook his head. “I’m disgusted, is what I am,” he said. “Really and truly.”
“It’s absolutely safe,” Lewis said. “This design is based on our parachute design. Distributes the stress.”
Bryant finished his milk. “Who says our parachutes distribute the stress?”
“You got me there,” Lewis admitted.
“Why don’t you do something normal?” Bryant asked. “Like read a magazine?”
“Or smell the flowers,” Lewis said. “Or both at the same time.”
“Well, don’t tell Bean, whatever you do,” Bryant said. Bean loved cats. It dawned on Bryant that that was the point.
Lewis said, “You just go read a book, Commander. Maybe this isn’t your event.”
They sat together under a huge hangar door and looked out at the steady drizzle. Ground school had been canceled and no one was forthcoming with any reasons why. The day had clouded up badly, as expected, and the sky was a depressing color. On nearby concrete engine block supports, water marks from the rain drooped like icing. Piacenti, Bean, Snowberry, and Bryant were rolling dice.
“This is what they call ‘bright intervals,’” Piacenti complained.
Snowberry was picking at his scalp. “Now usually I hate bedbugs in my hair,” he said. “But this one had that Certain Something.”
They hadn’t formulated a game and were simply noting who rolled higher numbers. It was not an interesting way of passing the time. Bean and Piacenti sat with their backs to the hardstand and behind them in the distance a small knot of men had formed around Lewis. Bean glanced over his shoulder and returned to the dice.
“What’re they doing over there?” Piacenti asked.
Snowberry shrugged. A small flailing object was tossed upward, a thin cord twisting behind.
“Lewis is having a cat throw,” Bryant said. He had decided he owed it to the cat.
Bean stood, without turning. “Was that a cat?” he asked.
The cat gained speed behind them, swinging now in a distant ellipsis around Lewis’s head.
“He wants you to go over there,” Snowberry said. “That’s why h
e’s doing it.”
“Someone should do something,” Bean said.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Snowberry asked. “It’s a trap.”
“That’s wrong. It’s horrible,” Bean said. He turned from them and took two steps out into the drizzle.
“Concentrate on what I’m saying,” Snowberry said. “T-R-A-P.”
Bean strode off.
Snowberry rolled the dice. “No hope,” he said.
Bryant and Piacenti stood up, as well, and Snowberry looked up at them in surprise. He said, “All right, all right,” and got to his feet. He added, “He showed me the harness. It was well designed.”
They walked through the light rain in an echelon, like gunfighters. Bryant felt self-conscious and faintly silly.
Snowberry squinted ahead at Lewis. “Imagine,” he said, “if he’d turned his genius to good, instead of evil.”
The men were cheering in the chilly drizzle. Ahead, Lewis had given the cord a few sharp wristy turns and let fly, sailing the cat out over the tarmac. It flew with legs outspread, like extended landing gear. It landed with some force and scrabbled up, stunned. Lewis and the men made a show of calling off the distance, footstep by footstep, and Bean reached the cat first, bending over it with a tenderness evident even at Bryant’s distance. Bean looked over at Lewis and the men with hostility and Bryant could see the cat’s tail curling slowly and alertly behind his protective back.
As they closed in on the group, Lewis asked for the cat and Bean refused to give it. Lewis hit him in the face and he fell onto his back. The cat sprinted free and crouched nearby, indecisive with fright.
Snowberry and Piacenti tried to break it up, and someone from Boom Town jumped on Bryant’s back. Bryant recognized him as a tech sergeant named Hallet and abruptly found himself twisting on the wet tarmac on his side, trying to free himself from an armlock. Hallet tore at his hair.
“Hey, you guys, an officer,” someone said.
Gabriel broke it up with the shaky authority of a more or less new first lieutenant. Bryant pulled himself clear with a hot ear and a painful scalp and slapped Hallet’s hand away. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Are you crazy?”
