The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  I made a wide turn at the end of my westward run, accepting a loss in altitude so I wouldn’t have to add speed. I was under one thousand feet when I lined up with the runway and began my approach. With the nose level, the B-17 held altitude, even though the airspeed was only 110 knots. Among warplanes, the Flying Fortress had one of the lowest wing loadings, so without the weight of fuel and bombs she was something of a glider. I was so low and slow that I could see sheep in the fields and even watch the people as they turned their faces up toward me.

  Half a mile from the threshold, I started down into the glide path. She began to pick up speed, and because I was getting closer to the ground, the acceleration seemed even more dramatic. The concrete was coming closer and faster.

  I was in the treetops well west of the runway, and a second later I was over cleared land. Just a few yards more were all that I needed. I wasn’t more than thirty feet up, doing about a hundred and thirty knots, when I reached over, closed all the throttles, and shut down the fuel-line switches.

  The plane began to sink, the wings shuttering on the verge of a stall. Twenty feet, ten feet, and then the thump of the lone landing gear against the ground. I turned my wheel hard right, using the ailerons to keep the left wing off the runway. I was rolling smoothly, except that the Fortress was standing ridiculously on one leg. She responded beautifully to her rudder so I could hold her straight down the middle. She rolled half the length of the runway, gradually losing speed, then the left wing shook into a stall and sank to the ground.

  The outboard propeller struck first, clanging like a cowbell, as the blades bent at the tip, then bent again and again progressively to the middle. Next was the left wing tip, skidding and sparking when the metal rubbed across the rough concrete surface. She began to spin into an ever-tightening spiral, throwing me to the side of my seat. I was a helpless passenger in what seemed like an amusement park ride, and then I was thrown forward as the overworked wheel collapsed, dropping the bomber on its belly and braking its momentum. There was a dizzy moment when I wasn’t sure where I was or how I had gotten there, but that ended abruptly with the sound of fire trucks and the smell of spilled gasoline. An instant later I was climbing out my window into the arms of the rescue crew.

  “A split lip and cut on the eyebrow,” Colonel Mast said, shaking his head. “You’re going to be ashamed to wear your Purple Heart.”

  He was standing over my infirmary bed, still wearing his flight gear. “They want to hold you overnight. You’ll be out in the morning, unless you start acting crazy. Personally, if I were you, that would be my choice.”

  I sat up abruptly. “I don’t need to be here.” Even as I was saying it, I knew that I did. My body had been tossed from side to side and cracked like a whip. Everything hurt.

  Mast turned to the doctor. “See? He’s already acting crazy.”

  The next morning the colonel grounded me for medical reasons. “Two weeks,” he said, “and then only if you pass a flight physical.” It wasn’t really a humanitarian gesture. My plane was gone, and there weren’t any spares. I’d be out of action until another pilot was killed or wounded, or until new planes were ferried across to us. When I stood to leave, he pushed a two-day pass across his desk. “That was a nice piece of flying. You were a long shot, but I couldn’t let you jump with the others. Your ship might have come down in someone’s henhouse, and then there’d be hell to pay.”

  I had two weeks off, and with my leave and my public-relations responsibilities I could spend most of them with Angela. What I wasn’t going to do was spend them with her parents.

  Angela came apart when she found me waiting outside her office building. For an instant, she was pure joy, but when she saw the bandage over my eye and noticed my purple, swollen lip, she was suddenly wide-eyed with fright. Then, safely in one another’s arms, she began to cry.

  She wasn’t herself until dinner, when she laughed at the contortions it took for me to get food into the corner of my mouth and the slurred words that squeezed out whenever I tried to talk. “I’ll do all the talking,” she decided. “You just listen and nod, okay?”

  I nodded that it was okay.

  She leaned closer. “I was talking to one of the girls, and she told me about this place up by the Wash. An inn, actually, in King’s Lynn.” Now I was leaning closer. The Wash was an estuary just above Anglia, where the coast turns to the west. The distinctive shoreline was a navigation marker for us on many of our missions. The estuary served as a safe assembly area for getting into our formations.

  “The woman who runs the place isn’t all that fussy about paperwork,” Angela whispered in an even lower voice. “No tarts or anything. It’s a respectable place, or so the girl says. And she’s a very respectable girl. I don’t think she’d ever go to anyplace…vulgar…”

  “Your friend at the office isn’t married?”

  “Oh, she is!” Angela smiled conspiratorially, “but not to the man who takes her to King’s Lynn.”

  I nodded and then matched her smile as best I could. Angela’s eyes sank down to the table. She picked up the box of matches and examining it. “I thought…it might be a nice place to visit…together…if you could get two days…”

  I lifted her chin. “I have two weeks.”

  “The problem,” she said, going back to her involvement with the matches, “is that it’s fifty miles or so. And train priorities…”

  I lifted her chin again. “I have a car…”

  “Of course, but you’ll need more than just that one can of petrol. You’ll be saving for weeks…”

  “I’ll take care of the gas.”

  Angela smiled, but immediately became serious. “You don’t think this terribly presumptuous of me…”

  “I think it’s wonderful of you. I think you’re wonderful. You’re all I ever think about. I’ll never be able to think of anyone else.”

  She laughed at the way I was slurring my words, then she imitated, “I’ll newer be aba to fink of any-on elsh.”

  I took the box of matches out of her fingers and squeezed her hands in mine.

  “When do you think…”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, cutting her off, although it sounded more like towarra.

  “Tomorrow? Oh, I couldn’t. I have my job.”

  “Tell them you’re sick.”

  “But I’ll have to tell the manager. He’ll know I’m not sick.”

  “Tell him you’re entertaining a customer. Hint that I may be buying an airfield.”

  “James, don’t make fun. I need the job.”

  “The next day, then. The day after tomorrow.” I was drooling out of the undamaged corner of my mouth, and Angela blotted me with a napkin.

  “Friday,” she said, giving me a counter offer. “If I tell him tomorrow that I’d like to be off on Friday, I don’t think he’ll object. I can even offer to work late for the next couple of evenings.”

  “Friday, then,” I agreed immediately.

  “We’ll go on Friday and come back on Saturday?”

  “No, we’ll go on Friday and come back on Sunday.”

  Angela laughed quietly. “Aren’t you being a tad presumptuous?”

  I could think of nothing else the next day back at the base. It wasn’t easy to put three days together during the war, and gasoline was worth more than scotch whiskey. Time, and everything you could do with time, were severely rationed. It was going to take some planning.

  I needed a phony event with the Whittingbridge community to get me off the base on Friday, then I needed someone to sign me out on Saturday morning so I could use my two-day pass for the weekend.

  I needed gasoline, at least five gallons for the hundred-mile round trip, a gallon in reserve against the possibility that King’s Lynn was closer to sixty miles than fifty, and an extra gallon for a bit of touring around the Wash. Seven gallons was literally enough to die for. Every drop was vital to the war effort, we had been told during lectures on setting our engines lean. Giving that much away f
or private use could get the motor pool officer shot. Even if I could get it, how would I carry it from the base to my car? In the past I had been able to sneak off with a two-gallon military can, but there was no way I could wander through the guard gate with seven gallons.

  The community event was easy. I fabricated a complaint from farmers north of the town about our landing pattern. That would get me out in the morning. Then I scheduled an afternoon meeting with Sergeant Browning, supposedly about the Mary Brock investigation. I’d have to get from the base out into the country, then back to Whittingbridge and back to the base late in the day. That was enough travel to requisition a jeep and a driver. My request stated that the driver could return with the jeep and that Sergeant Browning would provide transportation back to the base.

  Michael Carberry agreed to sign me out. The duty book was on the desk in the clerk’s office and the clerks had better things to do than look over the shoulders of officers who were signing out. Michael would forge my signature and no one would contest the entry because I would, in fact, be out, and he would, in fact, be on the base.

  The one remaining problem—the gasoline—seemed insurmountable, until I learned that my stock with the enlisted men was sky-high. Bruce Firkins had told everyone that I ordered him to jump, even though my chances of making a safe landing were much better with the flight engineer on board. The sergeants thought I should get the Medal of Honor. A few gallons of gasoline was the least I deserved.

  The motor pool sergeant made it all sound easy. He would fill the tank of the jeep and fill the portable two-gallon can strapped to the back. My driver would take me straight to the garage, where we would siphon the main tank into the Austin, then we would top off the main tank from the two-gallon can, and he would take the jeep back to the base.

  “But won’t someone notice that the emergency can is empty?” I asked the sergeant, concerned that he not get himself into trouble on my behalf.

  He peered through the smoke from his cigar, marveling at my innocence. “It won’t be empty after I refill it.”

  “But how will you refill it?”

  He made it sound ridiculously simple. “With the gas I siphon out of the general’s car. No one has the balls to check up on where the general goes.”

  On Friday morning I left the base in my uniform. In the garage I gassed up the yellow Austin and changed into civilian clothes, then I drove off to my rendezvous with Angela, and picked her up across the bridge at the end of her street. Neither of us spoke until what little there was to see of Whittingbridge was well out of sight.

  We drove along empty two-lane roads, some gravel rather than paved, most no wider than two passing trucks. Walkers and bikers looked up as we passed, more out of surprise than curiosity. An occasional jeep or army truck flashed by, hurrying off to some urgent calling. When we overtook a truck full of British soldiers, every head turned to examine Angela through the windshield. As we pulled past there was a chorus of offers for a much better afternoon than “that slacker can give you.” Once we were waved to the side at a checkpoint. A geriatric townsman in a tin helmet poked around the car, checked our ID, and then wished us a fine day.

  And it was a fine day. Cold as you might expect in January, and damp as is usual in East Anglia, but sparklingly clear. Angela was sitting close to me, making a game of shifting the gears as I stepped on the clutch. She was talking nervously about the typical winter rains, the changing colors of the marshes, and the cold winds that came in from the sea. In the middle of winter she had always thought about living in some other place, perhaps South Africa, or India, but this winter she was happy to be where she was.

  She talked about her work. The war had pressed women into men’s jobs, which she thought was something of a blessing. She was administering contracts, negotiating with suppliers, and appeasing military customers. The work was demanding and interesting. Back a few years, she could have become a secretary or a grade school teacher or a hotel waitress. Women didn’t have much to choose from then.

  But now her future was open-ended, and she was determined to find her own way. She wasn’t going to let herself be swallowed up into domestic routine. Probably she would go back to school to learn a business, then she might even start a business of her own.

  Angela talked and I listened, adding an encouraging comment now and then, but I knew her mind wasn’t on her words. She was simply dodging discussion about the evening ahead of us. I was grateful, because I didn’t know how to handle the subject either.

  It probably seems ridiculous to my children, but at that time men and women who found each other didn’t simply jump into bed. Sex was anything but casual. It was never discussed in front of the children and wasn’t typical conversation in mixed gatherings. The men’s locker room was filled with it, along with occasional boasts of imagined conquests. The women’s locker room, I understand, was also a hotbed of sexual speculation, but most girls feigned indifference and few would admit participating. Kissing, hugging, petting, and occasional peeks at forbidden flesh were part of the dating scene, but what Angela and I were intending was neither casual nor common.

  Most young women didn’t sleep around, yet it seemed that in every class or every group there was one who supposedly did. Her reputation won her lots of dates with lots of men, and it was with this type of woman that we claimed our sexual experiences. The nicer ladies never admitted that they had been penetrated, and a man who cared for a girl would fight anyone who even hinted that she wasn’t a virgin. Foolish, perhaps, and certainly hypocritical, but among my contemporaries, those were the rules.

  So when Angela and I were planning our liaison, we were breaking the conventional values. We were, in effect, pledging ourselves to one another. We weren’t going to the inn just for the fun of it; we were agreeing that our love was beyond convention. She was trusting me completely with her reputation and her self-esteem and I was assuring her of my protection, and promising her a safe and special place at the center of my life. We were past dating and courting. We had chosen one another.

  We didn’t get to our real purpose until we had reached King’s Lynn. Then she had taken a silent moment to face up to the moments ahead and asked, “How are we going to handle this…signing in, I mean?”

  “As Mr. and Mrs. James Marron,” I told her instantly. “On our honeymoon.”

  “Will she believe us?”

  “Why not? We’ll be acting as if we’re on our honeymoon.”

  She blushed. “Not at the front desk, we won’t.”

  “I’ll kiss you before she can say a word. Then you hang on my arm like you can’t let go of me.”

  “That will be easy,” Angela said, “but won’t she want to see a marriage license?”

  “I don’t think so. People don’t carry their marriage licenses around with them.”

  “Wouldn’t I have a wedding ring?”

  I went dumb for an instant. That would be the first place a sharp innkeeper would look. Why hadn’t I thought to get a wedding ring?

  “I have my class ring,” Angela went on. She held up her right hand to show me the etched black stone set on a gold band that she always wore. Now I was examining it for the first time. She slipped it off her finger. “I suppose, if I turned it around and put it on the other hand, it would look like a simple gold band.” Then she laughed. “I’ll just have to remember to keep my hand closed.”

  She took the ring from her right hand and began moving it to her wedding-ring finger. I put my hand over hers. “Shouldn’t I be the one who does that?”

  Angela looked at me, knowing exactly what I meant. “I love you so much,” she said. Then she squeezed her own ring in her hand, and held her hand against her mouth until we had reached the inn.

  There she handed me the ring, and I put it on her finger. Then I kissed her and repeated her words, “I love you so much.”

  The lobby was just an entrance foyer with a cushioned parlor to the left of the stairs and a dining room behind double doors to the
right. The desk was a small counter on the back wall, entered from a door that led somewhere else in the house. There was a pervading smell of soap that fit perfectly with the clear streams of light coming through starched lace curtains. The table settings were precise, pictures squared, and carpets exactly parallel with the floorboards. It was obvious that the owner didn’t allow the loose women that Angela referred to as tarts. It seemed that she didn’t even allow dust. As I rang the desk bell, I thought that she might just want to examine a marriage license.

  The woman who came through the back door was not what the foyer had led me to imagine. She was short, a bit rotund, red-faced and out of breath, and quite the opposite from austere and meticulous; she was smiling and gushing with small talk.

  “Oh, dear, I do hope that you weren’t waiting. That was your first ring, wasn’t it? Because when I’m cooking, I don’t always hear people coming in.”

  “No, just got here. Drove up from Norwich.”

  “Oh, a Yank,” she said, instantly identifying the accent.

  “In the Air Force,” I said. “Stationed down there. And this is my wife. We’re just married a week.”

  “Newlyweds. How lovely.” If she glanced at Angela’s ring, I never noticed. She seemed completely occupied with clearing the countertop of the morning papers and setting up her ledger book.

  “It’s really not a week,” Angela chimed in breathlessly.

  The woman took us both in, then she focused on my discolored lip and the plaster over my eye. “You look like it’s been long enough for you,” she said. In a kindly, motherly tone she suggested that Angela should take better care of me.

  I signed the register as Lt. and Mrs. James Marron, and gave the base address. “What you lads are doing is absolutely heroic,” she said as she read upside-down. She turned back to pigeonholes that held the room keys. “Well, let me see. Newlyweds! You’ll want one of the big rooms with a private bath, I suppose.”