by Jim Shepard
“‘A boy who can hit a clay pigeon on a skeet range can knock a Messerschmitt out of the air,’” Bryant said. “The instruction manual used to say that.”
“Jesus God,” Lewis said.
Piacenti tried to shuffle one-handed and spilled cards all over his lap. He said, “My mother said there was a thing in the paper back home that said that for a guy’s mother to wear the pin of the Air Forces is to tell everybody that she’s produced a son far above average mentally and physically.”
They were quiet again. A chair squeaked and he collected the cards into a messy pile.
“It’s true,” he said. “She clipped it out.”
Snowberry tossed Bombs Away back to Lewis. “We’re getting to be too negative,” he said. “They’re the ones on the run. We’re going after them in their backyard now. I read somewhere somebody said, Napoleon, I think, said that the logical end of defensive warfare is capitulation.” He repeated it. “I like that phrase,” he said.
“Napoleon was short of Focke Wulfs,” Lewis said.
Pissbag Martin stood and stretched and told them peevishly that he had to go. They could see he thought they were talking too much.
The card game broke up, and Piacenti and Eddy and Snowberry left with Martin. Stormy returned, disappointed that things hadn’t worked out and blaming himself, and turned off the projector lamp. He boxed the projector and pulled the tacks supporting the sheet screen.
While they watched him work, Lewis said, “My father worked as a porter out of Chicago for a few years. I ever tell you that? White porter.”
Bryant shook his head. “You told me you lived in Dayton,” he said.
“We did. He told me once they were coming into a station in Louisiana, bayou country, and it was completely dark. Woman was getting off alone. He’d estimate the station stop—a dirt road—and signal the conductor. He really wants to impress this woman, beautiful West Virginian. She’s oohing and aahing he can see anything at all in this pitch black. He waits and waits and then calls for the stop, and when he throws out the stepdown box, there’s this little splash, and then nothing. All they can see in the dark are these little bubbles.”
He laughed. “I always loved that story,” he said.
Stormy laughed too, distractedly, and gave them the word that something was on the next morning, folding the sheet apologetically and becoming more awkward at their lack of response, as they stayed where they were, each of them quiet and alone now in the darkened briefing room.
The next morning they were part of a forty-plane raid which was to join a larger force headed for Kiel. They had heard that RAF meteorologists were reporting the frequent lows that had covered northwestern Europe for the last two months were giving way to highs, and that Bomber Command intended to take advantage of the upcoming weather in a big way. Lewis had remarked grimly that they might have their next twenty-three missions in twenty-three days, it sounded like.
They never got to Kiel. They never got airborne. Whatever the lows or highs, whatever Stormy’s weak and maddening optimism, at 0600 the sun had not risen high enough to dispel the early morning ground mists, and the bombers ran up their engines one behind the other on the flight line with their olive tails rising above the mist like the dorsal fins of sharks. From his turret Bryant could intermittently see Quarterback, the plane ahead of them. Farther down the runway, the seventh aircraft in line had an engine fail during takeoff and went off the field and into the woods, through the perimeter hedge. The running lights on its tail winked through the fog. Crash trucks began rolling and the B-17’s in line behind became confused. The eighth ship, Miss Quachita, had already started its run, but stopped halfway down, Bryant learned later, having either heard the radio command to cease takeoff or having seen the red warning flares fired by Flying Control. Miss Quachita’s pilot, a quiet boy from Birmingham, turned it around and brought it back up the runway. Coming down the runway full tilt was the ninth ship, Cheyenne Lady, with Dick Ott in the tail and Pissbag Martin in the nose as bombardier. It was carrying sixteen five-hundred-pound bombs stacked in columns in its mid-section and its throttles were wide open. They collided head on, and the detonation snapped Paper Doll two or three feet back on the hardstand, jerking Bryant violently around in his takeoff harness. Martin and Ott and eighteen others were killed instantly, and the pilot and co-pilot of the plane immediately following were savaged by their disintegrating windshield. The column of fire billowed up like an enormous flare, the burned-off mist haloing around it. The runway and its hardbase were torn apart and took five days and nights to repair.
Morale for those five days hit some sort of all-time low. Someone had reported finding a piece of Dick Ott’s flight jacket, where he had stenciled a small white parachute to commemorate the escape from the severed tail, and the crews found the irony hateful. Hirsch kept to himself more than ever. Bean continued to annoy them and now seemed distracted and morose. When he did speak, it was often to make lists for the listener of what he had just been doing. Lewis seemed to want nothing to do with any of them, Piacenti wrote long letters home he then destroyed, and Snowberry sat with his journal, rereading more than writing. They flew practice missions and sat through training sessions sullenly.
Bryant spent his free stretches watching repairs of the runway, or watching Audie sprint from the hedge to the information hut at the outer reaches of the airfield. The dog tirelessly ranged after low-swooping birds with smallish V-shaped tails and chocolate and orange markings. “What are those?” he called to Lewis. “Sparrows?” Lewis was sitting on some stacked rubber tires, penciling notes on a fifty-caliber breakdown sheet.
“Sparrows,” Lewis scoffed. “Me-109’s. It’s a relief to know you’re up there in that upper turret, boy.”
Bryant flinched but felt encouraged that Lewis had responded. He walked over to the tires. Toward the fence Audie slipped in a wide turn and sprawled on her chin.
“I had a dog once,” Lewis remarked. “Looked a lot like Fido out there. We lost him on a trip to a combination car wash and country kitchen. I’m trying to teach Bean a little shooting,” he said, switching subjects without a pause. “In case he’s gotta fill in. He’s all right with a radio, I guess. But Ge-od, with anything else …” He shook his head. “If his IQ drops any more, we’ll be watering him.”
“You should stop riding everyone, Lewis,” Bryant said. “We’re doing all right.” But he was depressed and wasn’t sure he believed it.
“You guys,” Lewis said, “got the best substitute for nerve. Stupidity. Cooper,” he said. “Know how he got ready for this? Pulling trailers around Arizona, thirty-five dollars a shot. Ball used to catch rats in his family’s farm in Pennsylvania. His father gave him ten cents for every rat he got in the barn. Now he makes eighty-five a week and flight pay. You know? You guys can’t learn this stuff in five weeks.” He used the nail of his small finger to clean between his teeth. “You should’ve grown up with guns. Didn’t your father ever give you a .22? Didn’t you ever want to kill anything?”
“It was hard,” Bryant said, apologetic. “I lived in Providence.”
Lewis made a defeated gesture. “So, you know. There’s lots of things you could be doing. And they got you here doing this. With my ass depending on it.”
Audie trotted by and hunched to defecate, edging forward as she did so.
“Why’d you reenlist, Lewis?” Bryant said. He had asked before and Lewis had refused to answer.
“Flight pay.” Lewis rubbed his face. “Why else?”
“No, really. Why?”
“You got something better?” He guffawed. “The girls. I don’t know.” When Bryant didn’t look away, he continued irritably. “You ever check out the other services? Let me tell you something. I did. I transferred in. I was in the infantry. In the early days they said you could transfer into flight training, but I heard the physical for the Air Corps was a killer booger so I figured I’d flunk. ‘Eyes of an eagle,’ and all that. One day we went on maneuvers ab
out twenty-five miles out into the scrub and it rained and then it was about 110. My shoulders, my crotch, my feet, everything was killing me. They started to show us how to disperse in the event of a strafing attack. And this plane flew over and made a couple of passes at us. And I thought, Well this guy didn’t get up at 0400, he didn’t march twenty-five miles, he’s not lying in this shit, and he’s gonna go back and have a nice lunch. Tonight he gets a pillow and the sack and I get the chiggers. That was the end of that.”
Bryant was silent, reflecting on his good fortune.
“Hey, we’re commuters. They live at the war. And who doesn’t want to be an American Eagle? You think Robin’d have the hots if you were some dogface GI?”
“But you reenlisted. You could’ve been an instructor,” Bryant said. But he couldn’t imagine that, either: he remembered Favale, alone on that baked range in the sun.
“Ah, I was staff sergeant. I would have outranked the guys who’d been there for months. That would have been a mess.”
“You could’ve gone home,” Bryant said.
“Home,” Lewis said. “Yeah.”
They were silent. Bulldozers labored and roared to push earth into the great hole in the far runway. Huge rolls of thick linked metal sheeting were stacked nearby, structural support for the concrete. “I want to do this,” Lewis said. “Half of everybody I know from my first tour is dead or missing. I want to kill some of their friends.”
He was angry. “I’m a wrecker. Think about it that way. My question always is, what’s its Fuck-Over Tolerance? How long does it have to be sprayed? How accurately? Does it come apart big or just drop like a dog in heat? I’m checking out everything. 109’s, 190’s. 110’s catch ’em right and the wings go like oak seeds. Coming back on the deck I’ll spritz a roadside shrine, or a barn. Sheep keel right over. Cows pop like mosquitoes.”
“They’re just helpless animals,” Bryant said. He wondered why he felt surprised.
Lewis looked at him appraisingly. “I don’t know what I expect,” he said unhappily. “Most of you gremlins don’t even shave.” He scrolled sweaty residue into visible dirt on his arm. “Look. I don’t know what other guys think, but for me what this is all about is precision. Get good at something. You get good, and you try not to go ass over flak happy. You come through for the nine guys you’re stuck with.”
He gaped to mock Bryant’s expression, and shook his head. “Guys in the 351st named one of their planes The Baby Train. I know what they were getting at, boy.”
“The way you talk it sounds like it’s every man or every crew for themselves,” Bryant said.
Lewis spat with a satisfying arc. “I don’t know anything about politics, if that’s where you’re heading.”
“We’re fighting because of what they’ve done to Europe,” Bryant said, a little shocked despite himself. “What they’ve done to everybody.”
“That’s good to know,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t help me shoot any straighter. It sure as shit hasn’t helped you.”
Bryant could see, over where Audie had been, Hirsch walking the hedge, hand in the green. “Everyone’s so mopey,” he said. “It’s pretty bad, morale.”
Lewis had stopped talking. Then he said, “I knew a guy in high school, used to play football, used to run back punts. Very good at it. I got a picture of him, once, doing it, and I remember his eyes. They were like silver dollars, seeing everything, guys all around him. You need that—super-vision, that nose for trouble. Sort of like wide-angle seeing. All the guys I know still around have that. Don’t worry about shooting. Worry about that. Just help us see.”
“I can do that,” Bryant said. “And shoot people down.”
Lewis nodded. He seemed to have given up. They listened to the rumble of the bomber streams returning from Kiel to the other bases, the bases without their devastated runway.
That night Bryant dreamed of his grandmother, an old Irish-woman who’d gone erratic from drink, and a mental condition the doctors weren’t able to diagnose. She kept flasks in with the linens, he remembered, and behind the big bags of dog food in the nether reaches of the pantry. Bryant and his little cousin had been staying over at her house in Woburn—Bryant was ten, nine?—and the door had flown open and she had stood before them blocking the light from the hall, an enormous silhouette. She held aloft what could have been a whisk. “Who’re you?” she’d demanded. “What’re you doing in my house?”
“We’re your grandchildren,” Bryant had said, in terror. His younger cousin had whimpered, either at the whisk or at not being recognized, and their grandmother had remained like that, a frightening dark shape, watching them as they lay still with their eyes and noses above the protecting line of the covers.
The dream stayed with him through the roust-up and he stood before the mirrors over a sink in the latrine frightened of his grandmother and half asleep. Beside him Lewis was shaving with special care, feeling his jawline continually, and smoothly reshaving areas that offered resistance. The aircrews had discovered that even slight beard growth caused the oxygen masks to leak around the edges. Snowberry was shaving as well, scuffing away unnecessarily at areas Lewis was fond of comparing to a baby’s ass.
Hirsch already had on a tie and an olive sweater against the chill and was filling his coverall pockets with pencils. It made sense to Bryant as he washed his face: he could imagine the terror of having to navigate home without a pencil. Hirsch patted each pocket, thigh, forearm, breast, and hip, and patted them again, absently. He carried his holstered pistol like a box of pastries.
Bryant tramped to the mess hall feeling more or less outside of himself, a novice actor. The men beside him walked as comically overburdened as Okies fleeing the dust bowl. A boxy jeep crossed through the mist some yards away, pulling connected low wagons each of which carried two clumsy and smallish two-hundred-fifty-pound bombs. Ordnance crews were loading late in some instances. The winch sounds of the bombs being shackled in columns into the bomb bays drifted over to them. Armament crews were checking the gun stations within the bombers, and turrets whirred and whined faintly. He could make out men on the wing of l’se a Muggin’ struggling with the canvas engine covers, cursing and sliding on the slippery metal.
It had rained but it seemed possible the mists were lifting. Puddles along the tarmac shone like mercury. They had combat eggs—real eggs—this mission morning, and spirits picked up because of it. Most of the men were smoking, and the air over the tables, Lewis said, looked like Akron on a bad day. Lewis and Willis Eddy were still talking about the promised B-17 G’s. The G offered the additional armament of a nose turret, but Gabriel and Cooper had heard that the double chin created considerable drag, and that in the event of the loss of one engine, keeping up with the flight would be impossible. Straggling behind was suicide. Willis Eddy’s gunnery scores, besides, were abjectly low, and as bombardier he’d be operating the nose turret. They felt a little better about still not having G’s. They all preferred the greater assurance that they could hide in the pack to the extra guns.
“What happened to the biscuits?” Snowberry complained. “The only thing I liked was the biscuits.”
“No biscuits on game days,” Lewis said. “No beans, either. The gas expands at high altitude. Guys fart like rifle shots. Take a balloon half filled up to twenty thousand feet, it’s filled. Take it to thirty thousand, boom.”
Snowberry looked at his eggs with distaste.
They were checked into the briefing room by MP’s with white leggings filthy from the mud. The gunners sat in a line on benches facing the curtained mission board and immediately checked the yarn pulleys alongside it. A good deal was missing. As they noticed, they became even less happy. The more yarn was missing, the more was on the map and the longer the trip.
They were shoulder to shoulder in the soft and heavy flight jackets, and the smells after the morning air were eye-watering: Kreml hair oil, shaving lotion, sweat, cigarettes. Wet dog, toward the back. “This place is always pure armpit,
” Snowberry groused.
Lewis leaned across them and gestured toward the curtain. “I love this. Big security production. In a few minutes we find out what the Nazis’ve known all week.” Men around them coughed and stomped their feet as though to keep warm, and hushed their voices in anticipation like a parody of a theater audience.
The CO entered on schedule and they stood in a noisy mass. He had them sit down again—Lewis blew out his breath heavily, exasperated at the suspense—and nodded to the intelligence officer, who pulled the curtain. The red yarn line ran to Hamburg, and an adjacent enlargement showed U-boat yards.
There were scattered boos. Someone in the back held up a civilian gas conservation sign: Is This Trip Really Necessary?
The overhead projector flashed diagrams and photos of the U-boat yards. Intelligence laid out the route, and the expected reaction from fighters and flak. The officer had written, “Out-lying Flak Batteries Dwarfish by Comparison,” the “Dwarfish” hyphenated at the end of the board, and someone from the back asked in all sincerity, “What’s a Dwar Fish?”
“Don’t worry about the flak,” Snowberry whispered to Bryant. “Official word is that it’s only a deterrent.”
“I’m still trying to figure that one out,” Lewis said.
Operations and Planning provided some last-minute operational data, and Stormy talked about the expected weather changes to and from the city. He drew large billowy cumulus clouds on his own chalkboard to illustrate the expected 20,000-foot ceiling.
They were reminded not to underestimate the enemy, a bit of advice they found as gratuitous as anything they had heard since their induction. The gunners were reminded to harmonize at 250 yards, and to remember the bullet streams would converge at that distance and then begin to diverge.
The crews were glum and attentive. They always half hoped for unimportant targets, targets which would not stir the Germans into anything more than their usual hostility.
