by Jim Shepard
The plane hit a wall and he catapulted into and off the panel before him, ending up on his side. They were diving. The floor rose up past him. There was a cannonade of frigid air, and things flew past him toward the bomb bay. He covered his head with his hands. He crawled around on his knees to the flight engineer’s panel, and then they pulled out of the dive and he fell back onto the floor.
The interphone was skewed on his head and when he righted it, it was filled with panicked shouts and babble.
“Get me out of here! Get me out!” Snowberry was shrieking. Lewis was demanding to know what was happening. Gabriel was shouting Bryant’s name. Bryant acknowledged. The airstream through his position was strong enough to lean against.
“Goddamnit! Get down to the nose!” Gabriel shouted. “Somebody get down to the nose!”
The plane was more or less level. Bryant hooked into the portable oxygen bottle and heard Gabriel tell Snowberry to keep his goddamn shirt on, for Chrissakes, nobody was going anywhere, before he unplugged the interphone and climbed cautiously down through the companionway.
It was much too bright. Just below Gabriel and Cooper’s seat level there was nothing but space. The nose opened outward into air like a wide-mouthed chute, flapping wires and cables. The legs of Hirsch’s seat remained in a grotesquely twisted bulkhead. His gun mount flapped backward. There was nothing in front of Bryant.
Hirsch’s interphone outlet hung loose above his head. He plugged in. It sparked and crackled.
“They’re gone,” he said.
“What do you mean, they’re gone?” Gabriel said. “Where’d they go?”
“They’re gone,” Bryant repeated.
“Jesus Christ, did they bail out? What?” Gabriel asked.
“The whole nose is gone,” Bryant said.
Snowberry said, “Oh, no.” Lewis cursed.
“Do you think they got out?” Gabriel demanded. “Is there any blood?”
Bryant looked. It was impossible to tell. His hands and feet were freezing. “I don’t see any blood,” he said.
“Their chutes?” Cooper tried. A fighter flashed by, bizarrely close without the mediating Plexiglas. “Are their chutes gone?” Bryant’s eyes were tearing even behind the goggles. Lewis and Snowberry were firing and Gabriel was jerking the plane all over the sky.
“I’m coming down,” Gabriel said. “Take over, Cooper.”
Bryant waited for him, suffering with the cold and edging out of the companionway both for his own protection and so that his pilot might get a look. Near his foot was a shattered rack for holding Hirsch’s pencils. Gabriel crawled down and mimed something Bryant couldn’t understand. He stared dumbly at his pilot until Gabriel in exasperation poked into the companionway. When he returned, he gestured that everything in front was gone. Bryant gestured that he knew that. Snowberry’s guns were still going. Cooper was shouting over the interphone, “Get back up here, you guys, no one called time out here.”
The fuselage behind them rocked and twanged like a banjo, yawing to the left. Snowberry shrieked, the sound blizzarding into static on the interphone, and didn’t stop. Get it away! it sounded like, Get it away!
Bryant was up onto the platform behind the pilots’ seats and through the passageway to the bomb bay catwalk, squeezing past the narrow V-shaped support beams in his fat flying jacket like a child desperate to get through some bannisters. In the radio room Bean had climbed onto a box, an ammo crate, to get better tracking angles for his gun out of the slanted overhead window. He took off his mask in alarm when he saw Bryant, his face painted with brass dust above the mask line from the cartridges and so much firing. He pointed at the bailout signal as if to indicate he hadn’t seen it and Bryant shook his head, and indicated Bean’s walk-around bottle and the hatchway to the waist. They stepped through it, Bean following.
The waist was empty. Cold air was blasting through an open hatch, and they hunched in the narrowed cylinder of this tapered part of the fuselage and pointed for each other at the escape door, which had been jettisoned. Piacenti’s and Ball’s oxygen masks were still plugged in and hung floppy and inverted along the wall, like bats.
He connected his interphone at Piacenti’s station to tell Gabriel, and Lewis already had, having called in their desertion after the chutes had streamed out past him. Lewis was still cursing and Bryant took the earpiece from his ear for a moment. “Both of them?” Gabriel was asking.
Lewis said something about that filthy wop bastard and his pal. Snowberry broke in in explosive bursts when his call button could override Lewis’s and gasped and made noises impossible to interpret. Lewis said, “Bryant, are you checking on the kid?”
Bryant and Bean moved with peculiar and mechanical quickness, shoulder to shoulder, the seals of their masks trembling. They hunched over the ball turret and hand-cranked it around to position the exit door inside the fuselage, and yanked it open. Blood sprinkled upward from the change in pressure.
“He says he’s gonna puke,” Gabriel called. “Get his mask off.”
They pulled him out and he seemed to uncoil raggedly from the tiny sphere. Bean was lifting weakly under his shoulders and Bryant tore off Snowberry’s mask, the vomit looping and threading from his face. His head was moving from side to side and he slapped at his thigh. His pant leg was badly holed at the knee like a boy’s old pair of jeans, and beneath the dark and soaked edges of sheepskin the kneecap slid free and flapped like the lining of a pocket.
Bryant felt his stomach rise and squeezed his hand over his mask. Bean had not slowed and seemed to be systematically checking him. His left hand was smashed and the glove was flat and mangled. Blood scattered in cold and coagulating droplets wherever he’d been, wherever he gestured. He coughed and choked and brought his good hand to his mouth to clear away the mess. Blood flecked and painted Bean’s goggles.
They stuffed a blanket between his head and the bulkhead and wrapped his feet in another. Blood dripped from his nose and he looked childlike. He was whispering something and they both looked at his parachute, hacked by shrapnel. He whispered and they understood it had to be, Don’t leave me here, and Bryant shook his head, twice, to indicate they wouldn’t. Bean cupped his chin and Bryant wiped his mouth and they hooked him into Piacenti’s air. Bean’s gloved fingers sorted through the first aid kit. Blood bubbled and froze around the seal of Snowberry’s oxygen mask and Bryant scraped at it with the double-seamed fingertips of his gloves. Bean laid the morphine syrette on the tumble of the blanket and exposed the wrist of Snowberry’s good hand and gestured for Bryant. Snowberry’s head thumped the bulkhead in pain. Bean held the wrist as level and as still as possible. Bryant jabbed it with the tiny needle, anywhere. Snowberry jerked, as though that had been the worst of all.
He tried to remember what else was necessary. Bean had clearly moved on to the knee. He remembered bored NCO’s modeling splints and neat bandages in training lectures. He had Snowberry’s flight jacket zipped open and could see a soaked area the size of a baseball on his left side. He looked at Bean and Bean looked back helplessly, his gloves under his arms, his hands in the wet of Snowberry’s knee. Paper bandages flew from the kit. Bryant found some cloth, bunched and folded, and eased it onto the spot. He held it there until Bean lifted it from his hands and set it aside and moved to expose the wound with a surprising and gentle assurance. Snowberry’s knee was already wrapped, poorly but vehemently.
Bean gestured to the ball, and Bryant understood. In the hatchway to the radio room, Cooper, too, was pointing at the ball. They were taking additional hits, and he saw a pattern of daylight through the fuselage, a magical and artificial Big Dipper.
He removed his parachute and climbed gingerly into the hatch, his rear dropping low, his legs spreading and curling upward into the gun charging stirrups. He didn’t fit completely, and the contortion was painful on the back of his neck and his hamstrings. He felt Bean close the hatch door behind him, heaving the metal door shut against the pressure of Bryant’s back.
A straggler trailing smoke thousands of feet below and behind them was swept over by a swarm of single- and twinengine fighters, the spurts and blips of hits at that distance registering all over the wings and fuselage. All four engines caught fire and the plane broke up gently and silently into smaller pieces.
“We got manifold pressure problems in the number two engine,” Gabriel said. Bryant could feel the shaking, their engine trying to tear itself out of the wing. They’d have to shut it down, but with only two engines left they weren’t going to keep up with the formation. The shaking stopped, and he could feel the airspeed drop.
Behind them twin-engined Me-110’s trailed along out of range with the intention of executing stragglers. They had a choice in Paper Doll of bailing out or hitting the deck, trying to get back flying the lowest possible altitude, hedgehopping home.
Gabriel asked for a vote.
“Our waist gunners already voted,” Lewis said.
“I’m asking you guys,” Gabriel said. “Our navigator’s gone so I don’t know exactly where we are. But it ain’t friendly.”
Bean was not on the system; still treating Snowberry, Bryant assumed. Bryant said, “I say we stay. Snowberry’s chute is bad news. He won’t survive a jump, anyway.”
Gabriel waited. The plane was falling back now, and Bryant imagined Archangel and Plum Seed leaving them behind, the tail gunners in each regretting Paper Doll’s misfortune.
Lewis said, “What are we gonna do? The kid can’t go. We gotta count on the flying ability of our Looeys. And me and Bryant and Harold Bean to keep them off our back.”
“Big cloud to our left,” Gabriel said. “I’m gonna use it to get down.”
The mist of the cloud edge began to stream by Bryant’s ball position, giving him the sense of dry immersion, and another straggler below them suddenly rose upward dramatically but Bryant understood that it was Paper Doll, going down. Lewis said, “I say we divvy up Ball and the wop’s stuff when we get back,” and Bryant thought about them, drifting down to the ground, killed or taken care of, and imagined Piacenti grinning and burying his parachute. He thought of Snowberry and hoped he was sleeping.
The cloud was raveling white, as bland as thick fog. The cloud would hide them all the way down to the ground, he hoped. The walk-around bottles were probably exhausted. It would be good to get off the oxygen for everyone’s sake, especially Gordon’s.
The plane banked lightly and Gabriel announced he was heading west, to avoid the mission return route. “Maybe we’ll avoid everyone heading to the main force,” he said. “It’s such a mess maybe we’ll get through. Maybe we’ll have lost those 110’s with this cloud.”
“Oh, Jeez,” Cooper said.
Bean came over the interphone. “Gordon’s not so hot,” he said calmly. “He’s throwing up and throwing up as fast as I can clear it. I took care of his knee and his hand but I don’t know what happened to his side. Maybe it’s his stomach.”
“Don’t let him drink anything,” Gabriel said, helplessly.
“I got him wedged in so he won’t bounce around much,” Bean said. “I think he’s sleeping.”
“You better get back to the radio room,” Lewis said. “You’re the only gun on top, now.”
“Yep,” Bean said.
They racketed on in the white fog. “Keep going, cloud,” Gabriel said.
“But stop before the ground,” Cooper said.
Then the clouds were gone and green hillsides were coming up at them. They rose and soared over one, registering the successive images: the spilled stones of some fence mending, bright green clover in the sunlight, an open-mouthed boy with a staff.
They dipped and followed the land, a high-banked stream and tall blue firs going by. “Well, we got a nose open like a funnel and two engines out and enough holes in us to make a watering can and if our airspeed drops any more we’ll be taxiing home, but I don’t see anybody behind us and I think we slickered ’em,” Gabriel crowed. “Lewis? See anything?”
Lewis was silent. Then he said, “Not yet.”
“You guys can come off oxygen,” Gabriel said. “In case you didn’t know.”
Bryant pulled off his mask. The cold air streamed over his mouth and cheeks and nose like home. The hillsides and thickets rolled and pleated beneath them, bright with clarity in the sunlight, Paper Doll towing its shadow across the landscape. They were close enough to see the gravel on hillside trails and paths weaving beneath them and the cool, bottle green depths of a shaded pool overhung with thick trees. A white and black goat on an outcropping watched them come and ducked awkwardly, leaning backward on its haunches and keeping its front legs straight.
“It feels good to be off oxygen,” Gabriel said.
Bryant said, “The lieutenant can say that again.”
“I think I know what I’m doing,” Gabriel said. “I’m going by the sun.”
They’d begun following a stream, slipping lower as the cool spruce and fir tips rose past Bryant’s position, the steeply banked forest blurring by, and Bryant watched as the blue and white water unreeled beneath him, changing features and speeds, rocks, Whitewater, snags, clear cul de sacs, and around a bend he was over a fisherman, a big leather rucksack at his hip, ripples drifting outward from his legs, his thin rod the wisp of a line.
The stream banks narrowed and drew together and a fir branch whistled by his turret. Others slapped and grated their wingtips, and Gabriel gave a northerner’s version of a Rebel yell. A huge fir rose from a grassy bend and they lurched upward, the sound of the branches on their starboard wing like someone crushing kindling. “Whoa, Nellie,” Gabriel called. The stream opened out dramatically into a river, the water silver and smooth beneath, and they turned with it to the north, the prop wash from the lowered outboard engine fluttering the surface of the water. They roared by over a sailboat, collapsing the sail, and past docks and swimming floats, the white figures bobbing or pointing in shock as they careened past. They passed a humped yellow-green bank edged with willows and he could see picnickers and the red and white squares of blankets dotted with food and drink and that same crescent of lawn and remembered Robin, and swung his barrels harmlessly at everyone who pointed or ran.
Gabriel ducked still lower, and Bryant sped along in his glass ball twenty or so feet above the waves, catching a faint mist of spray kicked up by the props. Something rang faintly on the fuselage but he’d seen no one on shore fire anything. A woman on a float directly below them capsized as they thundered over. A small red dog ran to the water’s edge and threw himself in.
“Oh God,” Gabriel said, and ahead of them the river opened out into some sort of inland port, and there were two long gray ships in their path, the decks busy with superstructure and the tiny figures of running men, and delicate barreled guns swinging about to f
ace them.
“It’s the German Navy, for Chrissakes!” Gabriel said, and yanked the plane into a hard bank just as the naval guns opened fire with theatrical booms and huge geysers erupted around and behind them. He banked them the opposite way, trapped into going right over the ships, and as they spanned the distance Bryant sighted along the superstructure and opened up, able to watch in the river surface his hits skip and spray upward across the bow and along the deck, a crew member leaping and pedaling an invisible bicycle into the water. The ships’ guns thundered and then they were over, Paper Doll jerking and someone screaming on the interphone, and Bryant spun the turret and kept firing, the naval guns turning slowly to retrack, Lewis’s twin fifties clattering now, too, fountaining water around the ships. They banked away from the river and were skimming farmland, scaring livestock.
Gabriel was sobbing and cursing. After a moment they heard another voice on the same line, and Bean said, “They got Cooper. It came in the same hole the other shell made.”
Gabriel was still crying. “God, I just bent over to get the trim tab,” he said. “God, I just bent over.”
“I’m going to stay up here with him,” Bean said.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Lewis said.
“He’s a mess,” Bean said. “He’s all over the steering column.” His voice was flat and high with shock.
Ahead jumbled shapes and lines rose from the landscape and converged.
“Town! A town!” Bryant said. “You see it?”
Gabriel and Bean took them down the main street at full throttle. Wagons swerved from the road and collided. A woman cleaning windows toppled outward and he flashed past and missed what happened to her. The huge wings filled the street with shadow from side to side and the sense of power was exhilarating, the greatest rush of adrenaline of all. They went by a pack of dogs turning over onto their backs in supplication, a railroad crossing, three boys on bicycles all wearing red, gaping.
Lewis was firing back down the center of the street. Bryant began firing, too, for Cooper, turning his guns this way and that and ripping up the windows and housefronts in long ravaging bursts. An elderly and fat man with tiny glasses glinting white emerged ahead with a long rifle and lifted it to them, and he slewed the turret ever so slightly and triggered a burst and folded the fat man in half, his arms waving from a puff of red mist.
