Paper Doll

by Jim Shepard

  “Bryant!” Gabriel called.

  “Bryant’s hit!” Ball said. “I saw the guy go past.”

  “I’m okay,” Bryant was able to say. He felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “Frankfurt! Frankfurt!” Hirsch was clicking the call button on the interphone in his excitement and it sounded like chattering teeth. To their left the sun showed silver and wide on two huge rivers, the Rhine and the Main. The whole formation was turning north and east toward the Initial Point.

  The fighters were gone. Hirsch called in a time check. It had been more or less thirty minutes since Eupen. Bryant found that impossible to believe. Snowberry said, “You shoulda kept a better watch. You shoulda given that one to Stormy.”

  Behind them Lewis was counting chutes. Bryant said, “The top squadron in the lead high group is gone, near as I can tell. Completely.”

  “The 525th,” Gabriel said.

  Quarterback had drifted out of sight, straggling back beyond the rear group. In that direction they could see on the curve of the earth a series of small fires generating spiraled pillars of black and gray smoke. The sky between the pillars seemed filled with confetti and litter, the hundreds of white American and occasional pale yellow Luftwaffe parachutes mingling and floating down like a chaotic airborne invasion. A Fortress miles away caught fire and fell from its vee, a quiet bundle in the sky.

  “They’re pruning,” Snowberry said, and his words affected them all. “They’re pruning the 8th Air Force.”

  Bryant remembered himself and checked the functioning of the four engines on his flight engineer’s panel, checking as well the fuel transfer, in case Cooper and Gabriel had forgotten. His rear end hurt and he was glad to be out of the sling seat. Hirsch announced they were passing over the IP and after a beat Lewis asked what it was.

  “Dink town,” Hirsch said. “Gemünden, it’s called.”

  “Just wanted to know,” Lewis said. He sounded miserable.

  Bryant debated whether or not to get back into his turret and decided against it, in case there was trouble with or damage to the bomb bay doors. He’d hooked into a walk-around oxygen bottle and the rubber of his mask was cool and sloppy with sweat. He plugged in his interphone at the flight engineer’s panel.

  “Now hit the target, you son of a bitch,” he heard Gabriel say to Eddy.

  It felt as if they were accelerating, though he knew that wasn’t the case, and he imagined the flat and featureless landscape preceding Schweinfurt that he remembered from the briefing, imagined the flak batteries minutes away with infallible Nazis loading up and calibrating their elevations.

  “What do we do if they’re using smoke?” Gabriel asked, more or less talking to himself.

  The interphone crackled, and they could hear Eddy hesitate. He said, “They told us that if the lead couldn’t see the aiming point, we’d go for the housing and try for some skilled workers. We’re gonna hit something, I’ll tell you that.”

  You better believe it, Bryant thought. The notion of bombed civilians at this point did not concern him. People down there were being blown up. People up here were being blown up. Everyone down there had something to do with the attempt on his life. He felt the sway and lift of short-term changes in direction, and knew the combat boxes were breaking up into their small component groups for the bomb run. The bombardiers of all following planes, Eddy included, would release on signal from the lead.

  He could hear a distant thrumming and some faint booms. “Flak,” Hirsch called in. “Looks like one seven triple zero. Which is our altitude. If anyone’s wondering.”

  The ship jerked upward and Bryant banged his head. There was another shock and the musical sound of fragments splaying over the plane’s metal skin. He was happy to be inside and closed in, happy to be unable to see the sky.

  There was a huge boom and the plane bucked and reared upward and then mashed back to level flight.

  “Guess they don’t want us at their steel balls,” Eddy murmured over the interphone. Bryant could hear his concentration.

  “Everything’s fine,” Gabriel said. “Snowberry, did you see that burst?”

  “It was purple and red in the center,” Snowberry said. “I don’t know how it missed me.”

  Gabriel was skidding the plane a few degrees every so often as a last attempt at evasive action before turning the plane over to Eddy. Bryant felt the torque and gravity shift in his feet on the metal floor. Eddy called in the takeover, and flew them on the Automatic Flight Control, making careful and minute adjustments. Bryant imagined him hunched over the Norden bombsight the way Robin hunched over her drawings, her lips bunching and pursing, her eyes shifting in concentration.

  The rate of climb indicator on the far right of his panel began to flutter. He called in the information to Gabriel.

  “Stay off the interphone,” Gabriel said. “We’re fine.”

  There was a creak and a growing roar and he felt from his position at the panel the circular buffeting of the changing air pressure. Back through the companionway the center of the plane was filling with light, glared highlights curving around the black cylinders of the five-hundred-pound bombs. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and the noise from the blast of air was an environmental force that surrounded the particular and thin noises from his interphone. He looked down through the companionway and out into space and saw a golden and green landscape with low drifting white smoke crossing to the southeast, the beginnings of the defensive screen the town was pinning its hopes on. The sky below was pocked and dirtied with smallish flak bursts. There was glare beyond his vision and shrapnel tinkled on the open doors.

  His interphone was unplugged and he had no warning of bombs away. They shifted and dropped from sight in a single spasmic load and the whole ship rose beneath him from the enormous loss of weight, the horizon through the bomb bay doors ducking and sweeping upward.

  Below them the first salvoes were hitting and he could see each as a rapid series of flashing bursts turning dark red and then black as the smoke billowed and mushroomed like underwater murk.

  He watched longer than he should have before climbing back into his turret and strapping himself in.

  They were turning, flying in circles around the flak while they waited for the hundreds of B-17’s following to bomb. Bryant was not a bomb jockey but he had the feeling that their bombing pattern had left a good deal to be desired. He plugged in his interphone cord.

  Gabriel was telling them all to look. Bryant imagined him grabbing Cooper’s arm, pointing to the bombing pattern. “Willis! Mr. Eddy!” he said. “What do you think? Are they nailed or are they nailed?”

  “Hard to say, sir.” Eddy was cautious. “Somebody was way off. See all that stuff to the north?”

  “I hope we got an orphanage,” Lewis said from the back. “Kids with toys in their tiny hands.”

  They maintained a steep bank, Bryant’s knees against a shell chute in the turret. “I don’t think we hit anything,” Eddy said glumly after a pause.

  No one commented. Whatever had happened was no one person’s fault and there were more than enough extenuating circumstances. “So much for pickle barrels,” Piacenti commented.

  Archangel was pulled in tight behind their starboard wing, and Plum Seed was drawing closer on the opposite side. The flak stopped abruptly, the sky sweeping clean ahead of them, signaling the onset of fighters, and through the charging of the guns Snowberry asked over the interphone in a small voice if they were going to be leaving anytime soon, and if so, when.

  It became quiet. The flak had seemed harmless, defensive gestures the Germans only half meant but felt they should make. They flew north and west, for the Rhine. The plains gave way to hilly wooded areas dotted with orange and yellow.

  “You guys should see the foliage,” Snowberry said. “In August, yet.” They could hear him rotating his belly turret.

  Hirsch wondered aloud if they were exactly on course. Bryant knew that he considered himself privately to be th
e equal of the lead navigator. As far as Bryant understood, he was alone in that view.

  “In my opinion,” Bean ventured in a shaky voice, “this was an extremely difficult mission.” He had been quiet so long Bryant for one had forgotten about him.

  “Bryant,” Gabriel said. “Eddy’s gun.”

  Bryant pushed the interphone to Call, embarrassed. He had forgotten. “Eddy,” he said. “Is it burned out?”

  “It’s just sticking.” Eddy grunted. “Goddamn thing almost got me killed. I’m pointing it like it’s a magic wand, like it’s going to do something.”

  “You keep swiveling it around, even when it’s out,” Gabriel said. “You let it hang down and it’s the dinner bell.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Eddy said. His Gary Cooper voice had returned to maintain dignity but he sounded hurt.

  “Try playing with the retainer on the solenoid,” Bryant said. He waited.

  “Yeah,” Eddy finally said. “So what? Wait. Hirsch’s got pliers.”

  “Make sure he keeps his gloves on,” Gabriel said. “Or doesn’t have them off for long.”

  “I think it’s working,” Eddy said. “Who’d a thought it?” Bryant was relieved and proud and thought, Who’s not a good flight engineer?

  “You know the force is split,” Lewis reported from the back. “The second combat group has to be fifteen miles away.”

  “Maybe our group broke too soon,” Gabriel said. “Maybe we got a chicken colonel.”

  Bryant turned his turret to the rear. The other group was a pattern of staggered dashes, just visible flying through intermittent cloud.

  “Someday they may know what they’re doing in this war,” Lewis said. “Right now they have only the slightest fucking idea.”

  “Does anybody know how many we lost?” Lambert Ball asked. He, too, had been quiet.

  “Everybody shut up,” Gabriel said. “No more casualty lists. We got enough to worry about.”

  They could hear from the tail Lewis counting softly, the numbers just whispers, counting with the interphone on. Piacenti crawled to all the gun stations with a walk-around oxygen bottle, divvying up whatever ammo was left. Bryant showed him how to feed the coiled belt he’d brought into the turret, and when they were set, Piacenti made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and disappeared.

  The front of the plane was silent. Eddy and Hirsch in the nose, Gabriel and Cooper in the cockpit, and Bryant on top were searching for fighters. Ahead of them lay the corridor of their losses on the way in, the fires still burning and visible beneath the columns of climbing black smoke. They passed into it.

  “It’s like training, in Florida,” Eddy murmured. “Navigating by beacons at night.”

  They all recognized the similarity. “We could follow these home,” Gabriel mused.

  “This stinks,” Snowberry said. “We shouldn’t have to do this.” The port wingtip brushed through one of the smoke columns. They seemed to be only creeping along, as if flying into a terrific headwind. Snowberry said, to himself, “I’m only seventeen years old.” Someone asked testily why they were dragging their ass.

  “Look at them all,” Snowberry said. His voice was filled with regret.

  “Keep watch ahead,” Gabriel said.

  Snowberry said, “You know, it’s like you expect guys to get it. But not so many. Not everybody.”

  “We’re comin’ up on the Rhine,” Hirsch announced.

  Bryant turned his turret a final time to the rear, gazing back at the tall anvil of black smoke over Schweinfurt, now fifty—sixty?—miles back.

  “Dots. Bandits. Fighters,” Eddy called. The dots in the distance spread into even lines, and they knew they were in for it again. Bryant had gone back to believing he was going to get home, and here all these dots were, coming hard, to make sure he understood that that was not going to be the case.

  The air around them started to fill with small detonations and flashes and tracer lines began to lariat by, and a B-17 above and to the right turned almost immediately and plunged away out of sight, as if suddenly aerodynamic principles had failed it. The interphone was impossible with chatter and in the chaos that followed all the o’clocks were called out. A Messerschmitt spiraled by wing over fuselage, tumbling out of control. He saw a B-17 upside down and when he looked again it was gone. Something of a shining aquamarine sailed past, striking the turret and leaving a clouded white nick in the Plexiglas, like a distant cumulus. He fired snarling into his mask, slewing his guns around with the rage of a pestered animal, and shouting unintelligible things. There were hits all around him on Paper Doll’s fuselage, hits like dropping bricks down the cellar stairs, or pouring loads of stones into metal garbage cans. There was a stream of incoherent jabbering and Ball broke in and said, “That’s Piacenti. Don’t pay no attention to him.”

  The air exploded over the right wing, an orange sheet of flame. Bryant looked and there was fire buffeting from the nacelle of the number three engine. What looked like water or mercury was washing from the wing, and he realized as the olive skin curled and withered that what he saw was the aluminum itself, melting and spraying backward. He felt his turret overheating and understood it was his imagination. For all his fear he registered engine fire procedure, and he thought: Rev up the rpm’s. They accelerated, Gabriel a step ahead of him, and the fire continued. Gabriel and Cooper closed the cowl flaps and the fire went to blue and then thin gray smoke, though the smoke kept coming. The propeller feathered and stopped.

  “Fuel shut off,” Bryant said to remind them. “Fire extinguisher valve.”

  “Both,” Gabriel said. “We appreciate the thought.”

  He clambered down to his panel behind them to work with Cooper transferring the fuel from the tank of the dead engine, and scrambled back into the sling once Cooper had confirmed his readings.

  He settled himself in and swiveled the guns and everything went white and the plane tipped and there was a whooshing vacuum of air and he felt as though he’d been hit across the ribs and arm with a metal pole. In another part of the ship there was a scooping, thunderous sound, and he felt the whole aircraft slide across to the right. He gazed at his right arm and hand and was vaguely aware of Gabriel trying to get through to him, and he could see nothing but the discreet mouth of a tear along the forearm of his jacket, but the pain beneath it fascinated him, immobilized him. He thought of acid poured along his arm, searing invisibly in a chemistry accident. There was a strange unreality to all of this, not having been touched despite all those close calls and then this violation out of nowhere, like the villain in a movie reaching into the seats to knock his teeth out.

  He felt a tug on his leg and looked down to see Cooper, the worry evident in his eyes over the oxygen mask. Bryant smiled reassuringly, though Cooper couldn’t see, and made a thumbs-up sign. It must have had the desired effect, because after a wary pause Cooper patted his knee and left. He focused on the interphone and said, “No problem.”

  Static popped when Cooper, back in the cockpit, plugged his interphone back in. “The turret all right?” he said. “It don’t look like it.”

  He looked around himself, woozy and relaxed. The charging slides were smashed, as if someone had taken the edge of a shovel to them. The feed chutes were severed. Oil was jetting up delicately from somewhere and spattering like soft rain on the sheepskin of his collar. He had the unpleasant sense that his forearm was open, cold air on bone. His glove was sodden with blood and when he squeezed, it bubbled over his wrist. He thought, Will this be like the oxygen?, and was drunkenly proud of his courage in the face of his wound, and then said What? at Gabriel’s shouts of bandits, bandits coming down from above.

  “My guns’re through,” he said, as if wanting to get that clear.

  “Goddamnit, track ’em!” Gabriel screamed. “They think we’re dead meat.” Hits banged along the side of the fuselage, a horse cantering on sheet metal. He understood, and swiveled the turret. A Focke Wulf was arching by and he tracked it across their bea
m, and then let it go, and picked up a looping Messerschmitt. Another went by overhead and he followed it easily. “Lots of kills,” he said. “I got lots of kills.”

  “At least they’re less ballsy now,” he heard Cooper mutter. He tracked another, the outline shifting and slipping out of the cracked gunsight. He was scaring Germans, pretending to shoot, playing at war in the middle of war. Then the oil got worse and glazed his goggles, and he climbed tenderly out of his sling, nauseated from the smell and taste within his mask.

  He recognized Hirsch in front of him on the walk-around bottle, his eyes peering at Bryant as if looking for something. Hirsch was making lowering motions with both hands, gesturing Bryant to the fuselage floor beside the turret base. Light-headed, Bryant complied. His arm was raised and cold and Hirsch was picking at it with a jackknife. The jackknife seemed incongruous. Cooper appeared beside him and took over with the knife and hacked expertly up his sleeve, the sheepskin parting yellow and thick like whale blubber. Hirsch unzipped the first aid kit and held the sulfanilamide powder up for Bryant to see. He saw his arm exposed for the first time. The skin was whitish and sheared back and blood matted blackly around it, bright red here and there. Hirsch started sprinkling the powder, and Bryant watched as it crenelated the edge of the wound. They wrapped the arm in a temporary bandage, which felt cool and clean and kind. There was some hammering and Bryant was annoyed at the noise. Hirsch disappeared. Cooper nodded sternly and thumped his good shoulder and left as well. The plane rocked and stumbled.

  His head cleared a little. He pushed the interphone button.

  “Thanks, everybody,” he said, stupidly. “I’m okay.”

  “If you’re okay get back up in the fucking turret,” Gabriel said. He sounded absolutely harassed. “Cooper says it’s just your arm.”

  He struggled to his feet. “I’m up, Skipper, aye aye,” he said.