by Jim Shepard
Bryant didn’t and Snowberry did. They sat together watching Tuliese, who had quite a talent with the brush, paint the nose illustration onto Paper Doll. Now that he’d finally gotten around to it, there was little enthusiasm among the crew for ornamenting their B-17. Snowberry clutched his knees to his stomach and rocked every so often, glancing at the latrines regularly to assure himself they were there and that he could make it. Tuliese leaned close, giving special attention to the thighs. He was known as a master of shading.
The paper doll in question was a naked redhead vaguely modeled on Lana Turner. When he’d been informed that Lana Turner was not a redhead, Tuliese had answered menacingly, So what? Everyone had shrugged. She was being clothed with a filmy slip of what was supposed to be a nightgown inadequately covering her private parts. There was an unofficial contest between crews to be the most daring with their nose art, occasionally interrupted by halfhearted clean-up attempts when the brass considered things to be getting out of hand. Bryant thought of some of the flak-smashed noses he’d seen and considered how many hours of loving work were being erased in instants.
Lewis meanwhile was becoming obsessed with speed. His latest idea was the stripping of the camouflage from the B-17’s. With the paint gone there would be reduced weight and smoother surfaces, translating into fleeter Fortresses. “I mean, who are we kidding with camouflage?” he said. “They can’t see us?”
“You want to fly in a silver plane in the middle of one of those formations?” Bryant asked. “What about just carrying a sign in German that says, ‘8th Air Force Commanding Officer’?”
“Not just us,” Lewis said, with the tone of someone teaching the hopelessly limited. “Suppose they were all silver. All the planes.”
Bryant had no answer. “They’d reflect the sun,” he said. “We’d blind each other.”
Lewis thumped his cheek with his middle finger and surveyed Bryant a good long time. He said, “Sometimes you make it too easy for me.”
And Snowberry, trying not to laugh, imagining no doubt the tremor through his bowels, said, “I think Lewis means he doesn’t see the drawback.”
Bean received word that his best friend had been killed in the Pacific theater, and he was inconsolable. He did not eat and could barely speak and so worried Bryant that he decided to follow Bean around for a little while and keep an eye on him. All he was able to get out of Bean was that his friend had been involved in the bombing of New Georgia Island and had been trapped in a burning Dauntless. He sat around the day room feeling useless while Bean stared blankly at a Liberty Magazine. He had tried mentioning food, and Billy Conn, and home. Bean gazed at the table and touched an ashtray with his finger.
Snowberry slumped in a chair by the folding magazine rack. He’d been throwing up for two days now and he looked drawn. He had his sketchpad propped at an angle that allowed Bryant a look. The pad was blank. Every so often Bean shivered and rubbed his arm.
“How do you know he burned to death?” Bryant asked in a low voice.
Bean didn’t seem to hear. He fingered an old snapshot of his friend that now held a deep bronze tarnish, and let it drop. He said, “He was my best friend. What’re you guys?”
Bryant said, “Look, Bean, I’m going to write a letter, okay?” He pulled out paper and a pencil to underline his intention. Instead of oversolicitousness he intended to try something in the way of Life Goes On.
Bean simply sat, as still as a vacant house.
“I think Bean’s stepped off the curb,” Snowberry said. “If you want to know what I think.”
Bryant wrote the date on his paper and Dear Lois, and a series of lazy, slanted lines.
Beside him Snowberry noisily began to work and with quick listless strokes sketched a four-engined plane: a fat childish cross. After a moment he added a squiggle of smoke curling upward from the tail. He drew flames as fat parallel fingers and Bryant said, “Gordon,” as a warning. Without looking up, Snowberry changed the flames to bullets spraying out of a turret.
Bryant wrote, I guess these sorts of letters are supposed to go the other way, and stopped, and then tried, I’m writing because I got myself into a mess that you should know about, and stopped again, and finally wrote, How are you?, and decided on that as an opening.
How had he gotten himself into this? What did he want? Lois, and his high school, his town, his friends, all seemed like a half-remembered birthday party. Lois had a right to know what was going on, he told himself, and he felt a loyalty to her that was sincere and nostalgic. But he considered: Could he have written to his prewar self and communicated anything? He thought of Snowberry’s fishing trips from the journal, and blackfish rocking gently in the sand with staring eyes and mouths opening and closing as if speech were prevented by this alien medium of air.
Before, he had vaguely hoped for a Dear John letter from her, and had thought melodramatically that he deserved it. Now he was beginning to understand that his country, for whatever its reasons, had informed him that he and his friends were in the most serious way on their own.
He became aware that Snowberry was holding his pencil motionless an inch from the pad, and was staring at it. The pencil point was trembling.
Bryant crossed out How are you? and started again.
August 14, 1943
Dear Lois,
Things here have not been going well. We have been pushed very hard and have seen many things and the rumors are something big and terrible is coming up.
I have always wanted to be honest with you so I write this letter. I have been dating another woman here, an Englishwoman, and I don’t know how serious it is.
I didn’t know whether to tell you or not but as you can see I decided to.
He folded the paper. A dispatch from the front, he thought. If and when things ever cooled down, and he were still alive, he would use it. Word was going around about a colonel in the 379th who had told his crews that the key to fighting the kind of war they were fighting was to make believe you were dead already, and then the rest came easy. Hirsch in line for chow had fiddled with calculating on his slide rule the odds on their completing their tour alive based on the squadron’s current 6.4 percent loss rate and after some angry refiguring had thrown the slide rule away. Bean had left the line to retrieve it, handling it gingerly and reading the cramped lines and numbers as though it might have made a mistake and could be coaxed out of it.
“He was flying low squadron in the low group,” Bean said. “The guy who wrote me we both knew in school. He said before it went up, the wing tanks were hit and were spraying gas all over, that you could see it raining off behind the plane.”
Snowberry dotted his pad loudly and rapidly and made a peppery trail away from his box plane. “If Piacenti hears about this he’ll never leave his bunk,” he said.
Bryant felt some dull sadness for Bean but none for his anonymous friend. He thought of the grim white-faced officer standing among the wreckage of Lemon Drop after it had crashed, and his order, strident and unnecessary: Get this cleaned up. A strong sense was growing in everyone that the dead were just part of the mess.
“He was eighteen years old,” Bean said. “Little older than Gordon. Six months out of flying school.”
“Would you cut it out?” Snowberry said murderously.
They sat quietly without speaking. While Bryant watched, Bean dipped his fingers into the ashtray before him, distractedly, looking off at something else, and brought his fingertips, powdered and gray with ash, to his mouth.
When they pulled back the curtain on the mission board the next morning, the red yarn ran to Paris, and an enlargement of the target area was headed Le Bourget. Snowberry and Bryant looked at each other immediately and understood. Le Bourget was where Lindbergh had landed after the solo Atlantic flight. Le Bourget had always been for the two of them part of the legend. It was as if they were going to bomb The Spirit of St. Louis.
They were going after the depots where reserve aircraft and crews were believed
to be. Lewis didn’t like it. “Fighters,” he said in a low voice during the briefing. “Why are we going after fighters?” Bean sat beside him and registered nothing.
They would have fighter escort the whole trip, they were assured, P-47’s all the way there and back. Enough Little Friends for a party.
Lewis murmured about fighter suppression as they filed out: Why were they using B-17’s for fighter suppression? There was something strange about it: the operations map showed clear weather over most of western Europe, and there were plenty of more important targets spread in an arc across the map. Bombing airfields was not the most efficient use of heavy bombers. The crews didn’t complain—the airfields were not as heavily defended, usually, as strategic targets.
“Just do your job, General,” Snowberry said. “Nobody said it had to make sense. Let someone else run the war.”
“Maybe they want to give us a rest,” Bryant suggested.
“I think you hit it,” Lewis said. “I’m worried about why.”
In the jeep to the hardstand he added, “I don’t think it’s for what we did. I think it’s for what we’re gonna do.”
In the dark and cold plane Bryant swung experimentally on the sling seat in the turret and eyed the turret canopy critically. He wished he’d overseen the day’s cleaning of the Plexiglas; now it was too dark. Gabriel asked over the interphone with some sarcasm if he’d like to be a part of this morning’s pre-flight systems check.
They waited two hours for the ceiling to lift so they might have a safer assembly and finally went off just at dawn, a vivid orange band beneath a purple one behind the darkened and backlit horizon. The Plexiglas surfaces of the ships ahead of them in taxi position glowed with the colors.
They hooked up with a reassuringly large flight of olive green razorback Thunderbolts—as far as Bryant could tell, there were more escorts than bombers—and the gunners joyfully called in each P-47 flight as it slipped into place until they felt they were approaching Paris cocooned in Air Support.
The Thunderbolts positioned themselves above the formations and wove lazy-S patterns to maintain contact with the slower Fortresses. No one in Paper Doll saw enemy fighters until the formation made its wide turn out of the echeloned vees into the column of groups that formed the long train for the bombing run. The higher squadron swung in alongside Paper Doll and in the process, in a rare instance in which the purest chance crystallized like a well-laid plan, they trapped inside their newly formed defensive box a hapless lone Messerschmitt Me-110 that had magically appeared at three o’clock low just outside Piacenti’s window. The unhappy Messerschmitt flew level between them for a long moment. The pilot was gazing over at Bryant like someone about to get it in an old Mack Sennett short. His fuselage was dark gray with a white nose, with what looked like a little green fanged worm on the cowling. And then all hell broke loose, Bryant and Piacenti and Snowberry together hosing the fighter with tracers as the other planes around them opened up as well, the tracer lines converging from all directions like a starburst in reverse. The 110 seemed to stop and rear in mid-air, and pieces flew off like bits of confetti. It turned a baby blue underside to Paper Doll and then three tracer streams converged dazzlingly on the same point, like a mirror catching sunlight, and it disintegrated and flew backward out of the formation in a rain of shapes.
Smoke from the guns of the formation all around him trailed back from the bombers in satisfying streams.
“God, that was great,” Snowberry said over the interphone.
“That’s the best, that’s amazing, to get them like that,” Piacenti said. Bryant was trembling and overheated. He fired his guns out into space, overwhelmed by how intense the gratification had been, the physical pleasure detached from emotion, from any thought of the absurdly forlorn Mack Sennett face in the canopy before they had let fly. He watched the bombs rain down over Le Bourget, on Lindy’s head, and felt as though a part of him were killed off, and had no regrets. They burst yellow and white in the rapid streams of the bombing pattern and the smoke bloomed and spread like stirred-up muck in pond water. “Bye, bye, Bourget,” Snowberry said over the interphone, for Bryant’s benefit. “Hope the St. Louis was off at a dispersal site.”
Lewis reported a perfect bombing pattern, and added as an item of interest that somebody’s bombs had torn the wings off a fighter attempting to climb beneath them. On the flight home they had maintained perfect formation, the spread of graceful Fortresses ahead and above him beautiful against the sky, and the Thunderbolts had swooped and looped around them after they had cleared the coast, celebrating with their own near-animal grace the ease and success of the day.
There was a minor celebration after debriefing, with Cokes and watery Scotch that Cooper and Gabriel had stashed away. There had been no announcement but already there were signs of another mission the next day, which was supposed to mean no drinking. After their triumph they interpreted that as a little drinking, confined to the afternoon. Gabriel announced to the assembled crew that Snowberry, Bryant, and Piacenti had each been awarded a third of a kill for the Messerschmitt and proposed a toast now that Paper Doll had been officially baptized. Now that the Luftwaffe has felt the sting of our anger, he added wryly. They drank the Scotch and Coke and poured water over each other’s heads. It was only late afternoon and the minute amount of Scotch allotted Bryant made him woozy. It tasted like the metal cup.
“I’ve got an announcement,” Gabriel said. “Thanks to the selfless bravery of Tech Sergeant Gordon L. Snowberry, Jr.—”
“L?” Snowberry said. He was rapidly finishing a loose pile of sketches.
“—L. Snowberry, Jr., we were able to obtain gun camera footage of Paper Doll’s historic kill today.”
Bean looked at Bryant. Gun cameras were altogether glamorous gizmos reserved exclusively for fighter pilots. The notion of Paper Doll’s gunners employing gun cameras was akin to the idea of their jousting over aerodromes with the Red Baron or Max Immelmann.
“Gather round. Somebody hit the lights.”
It was a sunny midafternoon and they were sitting around crates outside the day room. The crew gathered closer and Snowberry stood before them with his pile of sketches at chest level. On the first was a number 5 ringed with a geometric pattern like a cue number on a film leader. The men laughed.
Snowberry began to flip the pages, rapidly dropping them to his feet, and as the other numbers appeared the crew chanted the countdown, as they did before base movies: 4. 3. 2. 1. The first sketch appeared, a few lines suggesting a B-17 with an oversized tail. The men cheered. The next showed the formation. The next showed a ball turret. The next showed the same ball turret, from a slightly different angle. The men hooted and complained.
The drawings began to change more quickly as Snowberry developed dexterity with the flipping, and the B-17 began to bank—though there was some argument in the audience as to whether it was in fact banking or whether a wing was falling off—and the Messerschmitt appeared, to a huge cheer. A close-up of the canopy revealed a fierce-looking Nazi with an eye patch, a dueling scar, and jagged teeth, and the crew hissed and booed. Across his fuselage were a string of tiny bull’s-eyes that an arrow and tag helpfully identified as “37 Downed Brit Bombers.” In the next drawing the Messerschmitt was approaching the viewer head on, guns blazing in sunlight-like rays. In the next, Paper Doll was viewed from the beam, with stick figures in the dorsal and waist windows firing.
“That’s Bryant. I could tell by the shape of the head,” Willis Eddy called.
“And Piacenti ‘cause his hands aren’t on the guns,” Lambert Ball said.
More sketches of the firing, the tracer streams double-dotted lines. Bryant’s and Piacenti’s guns were missing high. Snowberry’s belly turret, now visible, was firing right into the cockpit.
A big explosion, a swastikaed tail flying outward with lines of force.
A final drawing, over which was superimposed THE END: a cartoon Snowberry curled inside the ball, winking, holdi
ng up an okay sign.
The men booed and threw gear. It did seem to Bryant as though morale had picked up.
“You gotta be kidding,” Lewis called. “I think the only thing you hit was the Fort opposite.”
“Hey, you see the curve in some of these?” Snowberry rustled around at his feet for the appropriate drawings. “I got off some classic, classic deflection bursts.”
“Hey, the only thing you know about deflection shooting is that you can’t do it,” Lewis said.
Gabriel had a fat new cigar in his mouth, unlit, and he grinned around it at them like a proud father.
“Get a load of Billy Mitchell, there,” Hirsch said quietly from Bryant’s left.
“Gabriel’s all right,” Lewis answered. Gabriel was hearing again from Piacenti how the Messerschmitt had just appeared, as if out of nowhere. “He’s starting to turn into one of those beady-eyed sons of bitches who absolutely hold the course, the kind of guy you want up there. And this movie thing with Snowberry was a good idea. We could use some loosening up.”
Lewis stood and suggested a game of Gordon Pong, and over Snowberry’s protestations the idea was enthusiastically endorsed by the rest of the crew. Four crates were stacked two on two as a net and Snowberry was caught and dragged to one side. After some rules debate, it was decided that he would not be allowed to bounce once on the receiving team’s side.
He kicked and squirmed too much—it was hard to maintain a good throwing grip—so they sat on him and tied his arms and feet. The officers agreed to play, and it was Bryant, Piacenti, Lewis, and Ball against Gabriel, Cooper, Hirsch, and Eddy. The gunners against the ninety-day wonders, as Lewis put it. Bean refused to play.
On the first toss Snowberry shrieked, so it was decided to gag him as well. After a few more tosses the best tactics revealed themselves to be: on the receiving end, spread out and close to the body as it flew over the crates; on the throwing end, try to produce a spin which would overload one end of the opposite line and defeat attempts at a good solid grasp. After one throw from the officers that just cleared the crates—Lewis called net ball but was argued out of it—Bryant commented to the group on the sheer terror in Gordon’s eyes, and recommended a blindfold, both as a mercy measure and further elimination of distractions. It was agreed to, and Bean gave up a sock to that purpose when no one was able to produce a handkerchief.
