Evan Hunter - Sons

“Yes, sir,” Smythe said, “that was my first mistake, all right.”

“This is the best pilot who ever lived,” Ace said.

“Thank you,” Smythe said, “but I am not a pilot. I am in Supply.”

“I was referring to my friend here, Will Tyler.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars.”

“Which I’ll pay.”

“Which he will of course pay because he’s a trustworthy and decent human being.”

“Not like that son of a bitch Andy, how do you like that son of a bitch?” Smythe said at last, and grinned and actually gave Ace an elbow.

“I take it that Andy is the guy who put the horns on you,” Ace said.

“That’s who he is, all right. Biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” Smythe said.

“Would you like to know why Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars?”

“No, why?” Smythe said.

“Because he put thirty-seven bullets into the screen, and all thirty-seven of them made holes longer than the legally prescribed length of two inches. That’s why.”

“Thirty-seven holes, my, my,” Smythe said.

“Thirty-seven holes at one dollar a hole equals thirty-seven dollars, if my addition is correct,” Ace said.

“Your addition is flawless,” I said.

“Are you boys fliers?” Smythe asked.

“We are very hot pilots,” I said.

“Are you familiar with air gunnery, sir?” Ace asked.

“Oh no,” Smythe said.

“There’s a B-26 that tows a screen for us to shoot at,” Ace said. “We use a B-26 because it’s the only one of the bombers that can simulate the speed of an enemy fighter. The screen is made of woven wire...”

“Oh, I see,” Smythe said.

“... wrapped in thread, and we fire live bullets at the screen. Fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets.”

“Oh yes.”

“Each pilot has different colored bullets. So at the end of the day we can see how many hits he’s made. Will’s bullets today were red.”

“Old Red Bullets Tyler,” I said.

“Now there’s an angle beyond which we are not supposed to attack because shooting down the bomber is not the objective, sir, definitely not the objective.”

“No, no.”

What he was trying to explain to Captain Smythe whose wife had run off with Andy the real estate man was that you came up on the screen (you usually rose to meet enemy lighters because they tried to attack an escorted bomber formation from above, a position that gave them the advantage in speed and maneuverability) you came up on the screen in a flight of four airplanes, your bullets painted in one of the primary colors, red, blue or yellow, with green thrown in for good measure. Because the screen was constructed of tightly woven wire mesh, the bullets left a streak of paint behind them whenever you scored a hit. Now when you attacked the screen in a perpendicular pass, it was difficult to hit because you were traveling in different directions and had to lead it the way you would a flying duck. But if you fell behind the screen it became easier to hit because you were then traveling in the same direction at almost identical speeds and it was somewhat like firing at a stationary target instead of a moving one. At the same time, though, you were endangering the bomber because it was now ahead of you, say at one or two o’clock level, and there was the possibility of ripping its tail assembly to shreds with your enthusiastic slugs. The further you fell behind the screen in your pass, the more oblique was the firing angle, with the result that the slashes you put into the target got longer and longer. That was what Ace was trying to explain to the drunken captain from Massachusetts.

“... costing the United States Government a considerable amount of money should a bomber get shot down by accident.”

“Naturally.”

“There is a fine of one dollar per bullet for each bullet that has left a telltale hole larger than two inches.”

“Oh yes.”

“Today, Fearless Will Tyler put thirty-seven such holes in the screen, thereby causing the pilot of the B-26 to have a screaming shit fit. I tell you, sir, Will Tyler is already a flier of renown, even though he has not yet shot down a single enemy plane. He almost got one of ours today, but that doesn’t count. I ask you, Will, I ask you now in the presence of this grieving officer and gentleman...”

“That’s me,” Smythe said.

“I ask you why the hell you did such a dumb fool thing?”

“Because it was fun,” I answered.

June 27, 1944

Dear Will,

Daddy and I will be leaving for Wisconsin on the Fourth to spend a few weeks with Aunt Clara in Freshwater. The address there is:

c/o Edwin Mueller

111 °Congress Street

Freshwater, Wisconsin

If the Air Force has any plans for you, please let us know about them there. We’ll be home again on the sixteenth or seventeenth, it’s not entirely settled yet. Please take care of yourself.

June 29, 1944

Dear Will,

I showed your letter to Freddie and he thinks you’re a pervert. I also showed it to Louise, and she says she never read such filthy language in her entire life. Freddie wanted to send your letter to the Air Force as he thinks you’re unfit to serve this country in the uniform of an officer. I advised him not to bother.

I’m sorry you chose to abuse our friendship.

I certainly will never understand what got into you.

Goodbye, and I hope you have a wonderful summer writing other dirty letters to other girls who did nothing to deserve them.

The temperature in Chicago on that Sunday, July 27, had readied ninety-five degrees by four o’clock that afternoon, and there was scant relief from the oppressive mugginess, even on the beach. In Eau Fraiche, on a day like this, we would have packed a picnic lunch and gone down-peninsula where the breeze blowing in off Lake Juneau would smell of pine and the water would be as clear and as icy cold as a cut diamond. Here in Chicago (which Mr. Sandburg three years ago had called “half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher,” and I didn’t know how right he was till now) we sat on a lakeside beach and wondered if we wouldn’t anyway be basted in our own fat.

On days like today, when Chicago seemed out to destroy us personally, when her buildings crowded in too tight, and her people jostled and pushed and talked too loud, the thought would again cross my mind that maybe I’d been shell-shocked over there, otherwise why would I have done a crazy thing like sacrificing the eight-dollar deposit on the Mechanic Street apartment and paying all those freight charges to have our new furniture moved here? Nancy crying and saying she did not wish to go to Chicago, and my telling her there was opportunity for me there, what opportunity? A madman’s dream I had caught in a butterfly net on our honeymoon?

The advertisement had appeared in the Tribune, asking for a man with some knowledge of the paper industry to start as a traineee at Ramsey-Warner Papers, which was opening a new mill on the waterfront at Kedzie and Thirty-first. The waterfront had turned out to be the West Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River, and the new mill would not be completed until June 1921, but in the meantime they were willing to retrain experienced people in their own production methods, and were willing to pay twenty-two dollars a week besides, which was not exactly alfalfa where I came from. So I had gone to see a Mr. Moreland out at the Joliet mill, and I had told him that whereas I did not have any experience in the paper industry, I did know a considerable lot about timber, having worked in a logging camp from the time I was fifteen until the time I enlisted in the Army—