by Jim Shepard
“What is it?” Robin asked.
“We race on our hands and knees with the kids on our backs,” Bryant said. “And if I know Gordon, he’ll lay out a doozy of a track.”
The children milled around chaotically and pairs of names were going up on the board. “How about it, Colin?” Bryant said. “Ready to bring home the Cup?”
“No thank you, Sergeant,” Colin said. “But my friend Keir might enjoy it.”
Bryant smiled down at the little boy. “Any gum, chum?” he asked. When Keir didn’t respond, he added doubtfully, “Is Keir old enough?” He visualized trying to explain a fall to a mother who had never liked Yanks in the first place.
Once the question registered, Keir nodded.
Snowberry laid out the route and they lined up twelve abreast. A wide lane was cleared of everything but grease and oil spots, some of which were clearly considerable enough to play a role. They were to race down to the Wright Cyclones under the canvas and back. To minimize trampling, when riders fell they were out of the race. Bryant instructed Keir to hold on around his neck and lie low and the boy took his advice with ferocious concentration, digging eager fingers into Bryant’s windpipe. He was sandwiched between Snowberry, still in the Santa suit, and Hirsch. Piacenti, also representing Paper Doll, was at the other end of the line.
Lewis had volunteered to call the start. Snowberry whinnied and snorted impatiently, and his rider giggled with delight. After several intentional false starts Lewis cried “Bang!” and they were off in a tumbling rush, Bryant feeling the shocks in his arms as he jounced forward. There was a good deal of shouldering and the riders shrieked happily as the mounts falling behind grabbed the feet or calves of those ahead and were kicked in retaliation. Snowberry elbowed Bryant and took a big lead heading into the wide curve around the engines, splaying maniacally through the turn like a crab. Bryant accelerated on skinned knees and palms and lowered a shoulder into the turning Snowberry and caught him broadside, both riders screaming and laughing, and Snowberry crashed into the gallery lining the racetrack and only kept his balance by knocking over two girls and a gunner drinking soda who’d been facing the other way. The boy flew off his back but kept hold on his neck, and Snowberry came after him furiously, pawing the ground and gobbling distance while the boy clung to his neck like an absurd version of a weight handicap and tried desperately to regain his footing and climb back on.
Bryant called No fair! No fair! He’s off! but Snowberry was covering ground like Man O’ War, the boy by now more or less back in the saddle. Ahead of them Hirsch hit a grease slick with both palms and skidded flat out on his chest before tumbling his rider off to the side, and someone ahead of him crossed the finish line. With Snowberry almost on top of him, Bryant gave it a last burst of acceleration looking for Place or Show, but Snowberry dove in frustration and caught him around the thighs, spilling the four of them like colliding skaters short of the finish line.
Robin and Jean helped collect the wounded and dispense Cokes.
“You were marvelous, darling,” Jean said, helping Snowberry brush off his Santa suit. His knees were black with grease. She wore her red hair swept up on both sides and her skin seemed thick, like rind. “I thought the way you stood up to this bully was simply wonderful.”
Snowberry brushed his chin with the back of his hand and scowled in Hollywood pain. “The story you’ve just seen,” he said, “and the characters in it, are fictional. But acts of courage such as these are occurring day after day, in Europe and the Pacific, as Allied fighting men and women stand tall against aggression wherever it’s found and refuse to say Uncle. Or even meet Uncle. Without their noble inspiration, something somewhere would have been impossible—”
“Such a cynic,” Robin scolded. “And hardly old enough to know the meaning of the word.”
“I know what it means, Mrs. Weisenheimer,” he said. “It means someone who can tell the future.”
Audie was cruising the food tables and thumping into the legs consistently, unaccustomed to the new arrangement. She was pulling in a great deal of attention and very little food from the children. She sat and begged from Lewis until Lewis found an egg of unknown antiquity in the bottom of the box sent over from the mess and cracked it over the dog’s head. Audie sat unaffected at first, her cloudy eyes like the portraits of Lee or Stonewall Jackson, while the albumen slid mercury-like from the crown of her head. The children loved it. Bryant always found the dog’s foolish and inappropriate dignity heartening.
“What kind of person humiliates blind animals for sport?” Robin wondered.
“Tail gunners from Dayton, Ohio, I’d guess,” Snowberry suggested. “Who’ve reenlisted.”
Another game evolved while they looked on, a guessing game which evoked great shouts and un-English arguing from the children.
“It was really very sweet of you to do this,” Robin said.
“It was Gordon’s idea, the whole thing,” Bryant said.
“They know,” Snowberry said. “I told them.”
Jean kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It means so much to the children. I think they see you as superheroes.”
“Not a view to which their parents always subscribe,” Robin said.
The party was breaking up. They joined the others to help with the distribution of candy and paper squadron patches.
Snowberry handed a patch with a double candy ration to Colin and heaped a banana on the pile in his hands. Colin thanked him so profusely he turned away, reddening.
Bryant loaded Keir up. The boy seemed dazed and his grip unreliable, so Bryant put the patch and the Baby Ruths in his pockets and let him hold the fruit. He thanked them in a small voice and Robin asked, leaning over him, what he liked best. “Juice from home,” he said.
The children were then piled back into the trucks, clutching their loot as though they expected all of this to be rescinded at any moment. Robin and Jean’s truck was among the last to leave, and they waved once and disappeared into the interior. The men lingered over clean-up and Bryant took a bucket of water to Audie, who had found a quiet corner and was lapping up some spilled soda she’d nosed out. Hirsch held her collar while Bryant scrubbed. She lowered her head helplessly and submitted, quivering in expectation of further indignities, while Bryant thought of the children’s faces.
They endured ground training sessions that were time-filling and redundant. They were mustered out in front of the briefing hut in a drizzle to listen to a lecture on behavior while intoxicated, relations with the locals, and incidents of petty theft. They went back over aircraft recognition, this time with a glum Bean singled out to hold small wooden models at various distances from those being tested. It was especially galling to Lewis that they were still studying aircraft recognition—his suggested technique was to shoot out of the sky anything which wasn’t a B-17 that approached within range—and not working on aerial gunnery, or on tightening the combat boxes. The Ju88 ambush on the return flight from Hamburg had spooked the brass, though, so they were back to naming silhouettes in the dark. One of the lowest percentile scores came on what turned out to be a Ju88. The irony put them in a horrible mood.
At the third session a fight broke out between a tail gunner and a dorsal gunner over the real Ju88’s—over who should have spotted them first—and the tail gunner, a medium-sized tech sergeant from Peoria named Theobald, knocked out a couple of the teeth of the dorsal gunner. The dorsal gunner had gone down on one knee beside Bryant and Lewis, cupping his mouth with trembling care, and when the lights had been switched on, Bryant had been arrested by the two teeth on his desk top like irregular pearls, dotted with jewel-like blood.
They snoozed through an early morning session on hygiene (“Hygiene,” Lewis exclaimed when he saw the topic posted. “Bean picks his nose and eats it”) and tried intermittently to concentrate on an afternoon marathon having to do with ditching in the water.
The first image which came up on the overhead projector once the room was darkened was t
hat of an entire 17 crew minus pilot and co-pilot crammed into the radio compartment, body to body, in crash position. The presentation was clearly out of sequence, and the image faded from the screen.
“Fairies!” someone shouted triumphantly. The tail, ball, and waist gunners’ crash positions involved lying on their sides chest to back, nut to butt, as Lewis characterized so many military lines, and though the subjects’ arms remained primly at their sides, the crush did make things look comically intimate.
“Is that your hand?” someone else called.
The images reappeared, apparently now correctly ordered. The first sheet read: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A BOMBER IS FORCED DOWN AT SEA.
“Not a very military title,” Snowberry commented, next to Bryant.
They were comforted with the next sheet, a navigator turning rather quickly, Bryant thought, from his station, NAVIGATOR, it said, calculates estimated position, informs radio operator, destroys papers, picks up maps, compass, and celestial equipment, and goes aft to the radio compartment.
The image went dark again and the men groaned. The light came back on and a pair of small and flustered sergeants began working on the machine.
“Get the same guy who fixed the movie projector,” the earlier heckler called. The crews folded their arms and waited with a martyrish patience, griping about the constant snafus and trapped until the whole strip could be shown.
Bean and Snowberry argued about the Conn-Louis fight. Bean had admitted to everyone who would listen that he’d blown “over twenty dollars” on the fluke of Billy’s having “walked into that left in the thirteenth.”
“Two years and this geep is still moaning about it,” Snowberry groaned. “Bryant’s the mick. He’s the one should be yapping.”
“Conn won the fight,” Bean asserted. “He was ahead 7-4-1 on one card coming out for the thirteenth.”
“Yeah but he got knocked out,” Piacenti said. “Lights out. Capisce?”
“Nobody beats Joe Louis,” Snowberry said. “Joe Louis goes bear hunting with a switch.”
An image flashed before them of a bombardier taking aim at his bombsight with his pistol, like a cowboy ruefully dispatching his injured horse, and then it disappeared.
“Twenty dollars,” Bean said miserably. “I never bet money. It was a sure thing.”
“War,” Hirsch said, gazing at the huddled repair attempt going on around the machine, “has got to be one of the most boring of human activities.”
The strip resumed and they quieted down, becoming more than a little interested in ensuring that they knew the ways out of a sinking B-17.
At mess Bryant and Snowberry flanked Bean, and Piacenti sat opposite. “You remind me of Peter Lorre, Bean,” Snowberry said. “Except he has nicer eyes.”
“Why don’t you keep quiet?” Bean asked. “And then I could eat in peace. I’m tired of everyone always picking on me.”
“Cream chipped beef,” Piacenti said grimly. “Don’t you just love cream chipped beef? Me, I could eat it all the time.”
“Why isn’t the food as good as it was in Basic Training?” Snowberry asked. “Why is that?”
No one had any ideas.
“I don’t know,” Bean said, chewing. Every so often one of the beef strips didn’t give up so easily. “I didn’t really have Basic.”
“You didn’t have Basic?”
“No,” Bean said, a little cowed. “I got sent to the wrong post because of a typographical mistake. Me and about ninety other guys. The master sergeant didn’t know what to do with us, since we weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, so he had us on kitchen and latrine detail. We never got Basic, and I know I never complained. One day he took us out into the field and showed us his rifle.”
“Showed you his rifle,” Piacenti said.
“You know, the breech, and loading it, and shouldering it, and all that.”
“Are you telling us you only fired a rifle once?” Piacenti asked.
“Well, we didn’t get to fire it.” Bean took the beef from his mouth and laid it in a strip alongside others next to his plate. “Because then we would have had to use the range and he would have had to explain why and all that.”
“Oh, sure,” Snowberry said.
“Anyway, he put it on our record that we had Basic Training because of that, but I don’t think we did.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Snowberry agreed.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Lewis that story,” Bean said, after they had been silent a moment.
“You don’t have a thing to worry about there,” Bryant said.
On their leave, they hitched a ride with Army Supply as far as a sleepy crossroads Robin had stipulated and jumped down and gave the drivers the high sign. They stood awkwardly in the sun while the trucks labored and clamored down the curving lane like an embodiment of their own awkward intrusion into the countryside. They were both eager and happy, and took turns pushing each other out of the shade of a reedy beech tree. Snowberry compared the wonders of the upcoming trip to the World’s Fair, but Bryant did not carry the joke any farther. They had together that morning gone to the PX and asked the tech sergeant behind the barred window of the pharmacy for boxes of condoms. He had wished them happy flying.
“Aren’t you horny?” Snowberry asked. “I’m horny.”
Bryant blushed and let on as how this was all pretty old stuff as far as he was concerned. He fingered the package in his breast pocket, amazed that all of this was happening to him.
Snowberry pointed at Robin and Jean, pedaling toward them on ancient red bicycles and raising a low cloud of dust incongruous with their pace. “Here’s our World of Tomorrow,” Snowberry joked, and Bryant held up a hand in greeting, like a happy Indian, he thought.
It was the beginning of a forty-eight-hour pass. Snowberry and Bryant, thanks to the largesse of Robin Lea and her mother, Elizabeth, were going to enjoy what was for the aircrews one of the more coveted of the officially sanctioned activities: dinner at an English home. Dinner, short-rationed or not, in a setting in some way certain to relieve the sense of being in the service, and the war.
They hugged formally, the girls leaning forward with a cautious hand on their bicycles. Then they walked back the way the girls had come, slipping into single file when the occasional military transport passed. “Hubba! Hubba!” one dope called from the back of a Willys.
“That really burns me,” Bryant was going to say, but Robin turned to him and smiled, unconcerned.
The sky was blue and clear and free of the sounds of engines. Robin and Jean were politely happy but also a little jittery and hardly overwhelmed and Bryant wondered if they wondered if they’d done the right thing. He tried to exchange worried or even wounded glances with Snowberry, but his buddy was still cocking his head around, taking in the sights.
At the cottage Elizabeth Lea stood shooing geese. She held a hemp doormat at arm’s length and beat it with what looked like a small hoe. She met them at the iron garden gate, repeating their names as she took their hands in a way that was both warm and businesslike, so that Bryant felt both grateful and excluded. She was a thin woman with a posture like a question mark who somehow managed to convey the impression of standing straightbacked with dignity.
There were more, borrowed, bicycles alongside a shed black with creosote—Bryant was heartened to think of the work that must have gone into Robin and Jean’s assembly of four bicycles for the afternoon—and the plan was to drop off their things, and tour the countryside as their first activity. They were to go straight inside, Robin directed, and change into their bathing trunks.
They rode out onto the lane in a shaky cluster, Bryant having all kinds of trouble with his bicycle (“Mine’s defective,” he kept calling, to the girls’ delight), the chain slipping disastrously on the sprocket teeth every few revolutions. He was forced to work twice as hard to keep up, but looked up and beamed sweatily whenever they sent a questioning glance back.
They passed
a chemist with a kelly green sign, a baker’s window with golden and glazed buns. The huddled windows and doors and forehead-low roofs all seemed to him vaguely reminiscent of children’s books. They rode through lanes shaded bottle green by overhanging trees, one of which Robin would occasionally single out as particularly old. “She’s showing us trees?” Snowberry said as an aside at one point. Bryant kept his eyes on her back, rising and falling gently with the action of the pedals, damp enough now across the delicate wings of the shoulder blades that her blouse was clinging, and he focused on the simple pleasure he derived from that, as they soared down through curves, passing through shaded breezes that cooled his forehead. The leaves on the trees above them turned with the wind like schools of fish.
At a pleasing wide bend in the river they stopped, and rattled their bikes down a short embankment to the water’s edge. Jean led them further along a path until a crescent of lawn shielded from the road appeared, and there with a sigh she dropped onto the grass two small satchels that had jounced patiently on the bicycle baskets during the ride. They peeled off tops and shorts and settled down to the water and the sun. The undressing seemed illicit and exciting and awkward, though it was all on the up and up.
“This is something,” Bryant enthused. “This is okay.” He gave Robin’s arm a squeeze. He could feel the sun drawing the smell from the damp earth.
“I love hearing men talk. That’s what I miss most,” Jean said. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks were pink in the sun.
Robin murmured something reassuring. Her bare arm indolently extended in his direction. Her eyes were closed and relaxed despite facing the sun and her mouth was slightly open. He guessed she didn’t feel like conversation. From somewhere he caught the faint and pleasant smell of an oxidized apple. Above them the sun shining through some birch leaves gave them the translucence of fresh grapes.
He thought, I could retire to a place like this, and then grimaced. Retire from what? He saw himself a fat hatless old man in shorts, still unable to track a German fighter with a Sperry turret. But it seemed foolish and wasteful worrying while on leave with Robin, and he settled to face the sun. It bloomed a luminous red beneath his closed eyelids.
