Paper Doll

by Jim Shepard

  “Who told you that?” Snowberry said. “About the beds.”

  “Guy who bunks with him. Same crew. Pissbag Martin.”

  Snowberry and Bryant nodded, accepting the source. Martin had been named for his inability to control his bladder in combat. He was pretty well known, bladder aside, for being one of the calmest and more accurate gunners in the Group. Lewis had said, in their presence, “At least he scares ’em every now and then.”

  Tuliese repacked his tools and left without mentioning whether or not the turret was now fully operational. After he’d left, they sat with their backs to Paper Doll’s tail wheel, the aileron over their heads an enormous low ceiling, like a boy’s hideout.

  “Did you know I hadda stretch myself to get into the Air Corps?” Snowberry asked.

  Bryant looked at him. He’d swallowed some of Snowberry’s stories before and had been made to look foolish, the slow kid who caught on last, or last before Bean. “What’re you feeding me?” he said.

  “No lie. They said I was too short. I rigged some cable between two poles and hung there, two full weeks, on and off. I had bags of sand on my feet.”

  It was possible. Bryant couldn’t read his expression. “Weren’t you worried you’d stretch your arms?” he asked.

  Snowberry nodded, ready for that. “I hoisted myself up and hung with the cable under my armpits,” he said.

  Bryant said, “Are you going to tell me you think bags of sand made you taller?”

  “All I know is, I’m in now,” Snowberry said comfortably. “And I wasn’t before.”

  Bryant thought, He’s pulling my leg, and resented it. While Snowberry made contented squeaking noises with his cheek on his gum, he thought back to Gunnery Training, missing skeet, missing towed targets, missing first with the .22, then with the shotguns, then the thirty calibers, the fifties. He didn’t fully remember how many of his test scores Favale had fudged for him. He thought about his position and the level of ability he had demonstrated and grew frightened and unhappy with his secret, sitting under the expanse of tail. He was both anxious and relieved that no one understood how poorly trained he was.

  “It’s a funny war,” Snowberry said.

  Bryant thought he understood what Snowberry meant. He had tried to write to Lois about it, but didn’t have the words to express his sense of the boredom and tension together, the unreality of the whole thing, and the fear.

  “It seems like nothing’s happening, you know?” Snowberry said. “And everything’s happening.”

  Bryant agreed. “It’s like you just sit around, or you’re like Famous Walter,” he said.

  Famous Walter had become famous, unhappily, as the Two Hour Replacement: having just arrived at the base he’d sat down to mess, been told he was needed as a last-minute replacement in the tail of Banshee, and had been killed by flak over Hanover. All they’d gotten in the mess was his first name. Someone else had finished his Spam.

  Snowberry clunked his flying boots together at the toes. They were oversized enough to be his father’s. “God, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he said. “I thought they were the end. Girls die for fighter pilots. They only get wounded for us.”

  “I was a Lindy nut,” Bryant said. “Were you a Lindbergh nut? He came and gave a speech in Providence and they sold little hats. I think it was about staying out of the war, but what did we care? It was Lindy.”

  “Oh, boy,” Snowberry said. “I must’ve made two thousand Spirit of St. Louis’s from those wooden Popsicle sticks. House was knee deep in Spirit of St. Louis’s.”

  “I used to play toy soldiers,” Bryant said. “The cardboard kind, with the wood bases. I had a little lead Spirit of St. Louis, used to fly over, strafe the soldiers. I used to have the guys go, ‘Look out! It’s Lindy! Aaah!’ No one stood up to the airplanes. Everyone did a lot of running and dying.”

  “Like now,” Snowberry said. “The Krauts: ‘Bryant and Snowberry! Aaah!’”

  They laughed. Bryant had a vision of flak crews in Germany chafing at the insult, crossing hairs over the belly of Paper Doll, and sobered.

  “You’re all right, Bobby,” Snowberry said. “Lewis is tops, but …” he trailed off.

  Bryant was grateful and slightly embarrassed, unsure what he was getting at. He cleared his throat.

  “Anyway, I keep, like, a diary,” Snowberry said.

  “I saw you working on it,” Bryant said.

  “I know you read a lot and stuff.” Bryant read magazines in the day room. “I want to send some parts home to my folks, the best stuff. They’re always telling me to write and I never know what to say.”

  “That’s nice, a diary,” Bryant said. The idea didn’t appeal to him.

  “Here, you can look at it,” Snowberry suggested. He pulled it out of his back pocket. It was a smallish softcover. Bryant started to hand it back and protested it was private, but Snowberry assured him that it was all right, they were buddies, so Bryant was forced to open it.

  The cover featured in red ink a battle-weary GI who’d apparently stopped to write beside a makeshift roadside sign. The sign said My War Diary. The book was already half full.

  The margins were crammed with additions and helpful drawings and diagrams—how the arc of the tracers helped him lead a target in gunnery, what approaches he was responsible for defending from the belly. There was a cutaway drawing of Paper Doll, outlining the crew positions, entitled Our Plane.

  He flipped to the back, the morning’s entry.

  Hi again. Another f-ing (!) scrub. It’s terrible and now we’re all juiced up with nowhere to go. It always clears up later but by then it’s too late and everyone’s a real pain to be around. Lewis you can’t even go near. Trying to guess the weather is awful hard. And harder, I guess, for the weatherman (!) We call our base weather officer Stormy. Lewis says he uses a weejee (?) board. He’s a nice guy, though. It’s real bad for morale, a scrub: we fly eight missions on the ground for every one in the air, and it’s bad to get up and think you’re going to be a day closer to the end of your tour and then find out it’s all blooie.

  He paged back to July and Training. There was a small sketch of a latrine with flies and curving lines above it.

  I stink, though I’m getting better, everybody says so. I whipsaw everything like I’m using a garden hose and I squeeze off bursts that are too long. My training officer told me he was going to ration me, but he can’t, of course. I have to be through in the next week and a half or it’s washeroonie. I don’t think I’ll wash, though. On the flexibles me and another guy named Flynn flying tandem cut a tow target clear in half this morning, and that’s good work! The tow plane even had it dipping and weaving, like real Jerries.

  I still like the idea of being a dentist. I talked to the guy who examined me at the induction center and he said I’d be looking at big money and mucho opportunity after the war and the government would help out in terms of school like I couldn’t believe. Mom’s nuts about the idea, of course, and wouldn’t she be surprised to hear we agree on something. Mom said Liz said I’d never do it because I’d have to wash my hands. Ha. Ha.

  Snowberry was gazing lazily ahead, humming “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”

  Bryant said, “You never said you had a sister.”

  Snowberry looked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  Bryant closed the book and stretched, his finger holding the place.

  “Keep reading,” Snowberry said. “It gets better.”

  I remember before Dad died we’d go camping out at Port Jefferson. Somebody owned the land and Dad didn’t care, though I never wanted to have a fire, I thought they’d come and start shooting. We went for my birthday once. I loved the woods and stuff. There were never any stores or lights and you didn’t have so much noise. We saw a shooting star. Dad said on my tenth birthday I saw a shooting star and on my first birthday I saw Babe Ruth clout number forty-six on his way to sixty, and he didn’t think if I lived to be
a hundred I’d ever see the like of either again. Though of course I don’t remember the home run.

  Bryant did some quick figuring, and confirmed Snowberry’s age as seventeen. He was underage, something everyone suspected and joked about.

  He thought again with regret about how rarely he was able to remember the kind of father and son stories Snowberry always told, recognizing with a pang Snowberry’s references to the private jokes that seemed the code of a happy family. His only memory of a camping trip had involved a weekend in Block Island with his father. His father had always called it in an unpleasant way Our Only Night Out. He had had to go to the bathroom late the first night and had stumbled out of his bedroll and up the dune ridge. Above him, the night was coming down in curtains, silver and red and purple. He hadn’t been able to think of the word for it, and had called to his father, who’d come hurrying up the dune and then had stopped short and said, “The northern lights. For God’s sake.” But he had wrapped an arm around him.

  He remembered it as their happiest time together, maybe their only happy time together. He remembered that they had fished and hadn’t caught anything, and that his father had said, “The buggers are unionized.” His father had pulled from an old pack some bread and a roll of provolone cheese that he called guinea cheese, and then had gone down to the cove sheltered by the dune ridge and had collected saltwater snails in a pan, a small black figure against the wavering light off the water. The snails had looked like little rounded black pebbles, and he had cooked them in saltwater and split them with Bryant. They had had twenty or so apiece, and had eaten them out of their shells with a pin. They had been terrible.

  The next night they had had corn dogs and bluefish. They hung netting against mosquitoes on a crisscrossing pole thing he’d rigged up, on a wide flat sandy stretch at the bottom of the dunes on the west side of the island, away from the cliffs. His father had congratulated him on the netting arrangement. They sat at the water’s edge on huge driftwood twisted smooth into horror movie shapes and gutted the blues, the raspberry and clearish fish organs washing away in the rippling dark water. His father had popped a blue’s eye and it had floated a while in a strange blank way before sinking. His father had dipped the fish in some warm beer he’d carried in, and some corn meal, and they fried it over a fire they dug low in a sandy pit. His father had drunk quietly and consistently from a flask and Bryant could smell the rye on his breath. He remembered the rye and fish and saltwater smell. He remembered sleeping looking up through his netting and poles with all the mosquitoes locked out and the stars beyond.

  “Pretty good, isn’t it?” Snowberry said. Bryant still had his diary open, though he’d been on one page for a good while. He nodded, and flipped around.

  He remembered the sound of the water and the little waves from the boats tied up in the bay. They could hear the boards and planks creaking a long way off. In the morning they were wet and the fog made the water disappear. He remembered the speckled metal cup with the big ACE stenciled cryptically on it, and the heat of the coffee with no milk through the cup to his hands. He remembered the stray dog that had snuffled around while the sun was still pink and low and everything was wet and cold and the dog’s nose snorting in the morning air. Its back leg was badly hurt and it nosed and sniffed them but wouldn’t let his father get near to help. “Poor son of a bitch,” his father had said, and he remembered thinking that the dog was going to die.

  That night the projector broke down. Bryant and Snowberry took a reel of Buck Privates from the can and unspooled part of it, holding an open-mouthed Lou Costello up to the light. On another reel they found June Allyson, in color besides.

  “They must’ve mixed up the reels,” Bryant said. “Too bad the projector broke.”

  “Some of these guys wouldn’t’ve even blinked,” Snowberry said.

  They had remained in the darkened briefing room after everyone else had drifted away. Snowberry looked farther down the reel for more June Allyson, whom he called Prince Valiant. He was starting a good-sized tangle of celluloid at his feet. He crooned softly to himself.

  Poor Stormy, who’d arranged all of this, sent a tech sergeant off to Supply for a manual. They needed one, the projectionist had theorized, since it evidently wasn’t with the machine. Most of the men had already left in disgust or boredom. The lamp for the machine was still on and light flickered on the sheet hung as a screen. There was nothing to do.

  Lewis was sprawled between two folding chairs, flipping through something. Piacenti and Pissbag Martin were playing blackjack on a fifty-gallon drum labeled, mysteriously, USARC.

  Bryant straddled a chair and asked Lewis what he was reading.

  “Gabriel’s pilot’s manual,” he said.

  The others looked up from the card game.

  “He won’t miss it,” Lewis said off-handedly. “He only studies it twenty-three hours a day. This is his hour off.”

  “Lemme see,” Snowberry said. “What’s it say?”

  “It says you should get to know your crew,” Lewis said. “Their strengths and weaknesses.” Snowberry was making shadow animals with his fingers in front of the projector lens. “Listen to this: ‘Of all branches of the Service, the Air Corps must act with the least precedent, the least tradition.’”

  Snowberry looked over at him. “That’s not a pilot’s manual,” he said.

  Bryant looked closer. “It’s something called Bombs Away,” he said.

  “It’s a book Bean brought with him,” Lewis said. “The kind they give kids in school about the Army.” He continued reading. “‘Nearly all the tactics and formations of infantry have been tested over ten thousand years. Even tanks, though they operate at a high rate of speed, make use of tactics which were developed first by chariot and then by cavalry. But the Air Corps has no centuries of trial and error to study; it must feel its way, making its errors and correcting them.’”

  “Oh, God,” Snowberry said. They laughed. Hirsch and Willis Eddy wandered back in, and sat beside Bryant. Lewis flipped the manual to Snowberry, who turned a page and went on aloud:

  “‘The pilot and co-pilot must fly the ship, that is true, but they take their directions from the navigator, for he knows where they are and where they are going and how to get there.’”

  “Where are we, Hirsch?” Lewis asked.

  “England,” Hirsch said.

  “‘Arriving at the target, the bombardier must take command, for it is he who must drop the bombs on the target safely.’”

  “This just confirms what I been saying all along,” Willis Eddy said. He was a big, slow-moving boy who liked to say he reminded people of Gary Cooper. “You’re all just here to get me to the target safely.”

  “Eddy here was hell with the practice bombs,” Pissbag Martin said.

  Eddy shrugged. He cultivated the impression that he was hard to rattle. “My instructor used to say, ‘Dropping your eggs on a dime from twenty thousand feet is easy. Think of this simple analogy.’”

  “What is this Southern drawl stuff?” Snowberry asked. “Who’re you supposed to be, Henry Fonda?”

  “He used to say,” Eddy continued, “it was like getting on a bike, riding it past a thimble, and dropping grains of rice into the thimble.”

  “Pretty big thimble, in your case,” Lewis said.

  Bryant thought it might be time for some esprit de corps. He said, “The whole wing dropped early on that mission. Willis wasn’t lead bombardier.” Eddy’s bombs, with everyone else’s, had been dropped short on Paper Doll’s most recent mission. Eddy was unperturbed and didn’t seem to feel he needed defending.

  Snowberry flapped the book to show he was going to go on reading. “‘All during flight,’” he read, “‘the engineer commands the engines and sees that they continue to function well.’” Bryant felt himself reddening, but no one commented. “‘The radio man is the voice and ears of the plane, keeping contact with squadron and base.’”

  “You know, it bothers me that I’m a membe
r of an important team alongside the fat kid who never got into games at the playground,” Lewis said.

  “‘And all the time the aerial gunners are charged with the defense of the ship. On the sharpness of their eyes and the accuracy of their aim the safety of the whole crew depends.’”

  Lewis snorted.

  Snowberry said, “Aren’t you the Hottentot! Are we so bad?”

  Marksmanship was a sore point with Lewis. He said, “We’re not the Tennessee riflemen up there, if you were wondering.” He had been spending time with them lately on deflection shooting, and not having much success. They had only had time to learn, and relied upon, what the Air Corps officially termed the Zone System. The Zone System was defined as pointing at the offending object, leading it a little, and filling the sky with bullets.

  “I think the boys’re doing fine,” Willis Eddy drawled.

  “The only way to get through this,” Lewis said, “I figure, is to make the Heinies look for a bigger pushover. You have to turn yourself into some kind of risk.”

  “Hell, these guys can’t shoot,” Pissbag Martin said. “The guns’re there so they can show they’re pissed off at being attacked.”

  “Sometimes I do get the idea we’re just sort of feeling our way, here,” Snowberry admitted. “It’s like one day I just woke up operational.”

  “I don’t know how Billy Barty could shoot straight from that ball turret,” Eddy said. “Twisted up looking down through your legs and all that hooey.”

  Pissbag Martin shook his head. “I don’t go anywhere at twenty-five thousand feet you can’t take your parachute.”

  “What if we do like you say, Lewis?” Bryant asked. He was thinking while they had been talking that he was going to be up all night again, dreaming of a sky filled with Germans. “What if we do like you say, and then get it?”

  “We have a saying for that,” Lewis said. “We say, ‘Tough shit.’”

  They were quiet. “Hit me,” Pissbag Martin said, and Piacenti flipped a card onto his two.

  “Ah, if God had wanted us to shoot down Germans, he would’ve kept us guys out of gunnery,” Snowberry said.