Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Far ahead they could see the other 17’s. He stayed in the top turret, his weight back on the turret’s padded sling. His goggles were up on his forehead and the elastic strap bunched the crown of his soft, sheepskin-lined headgear. Cooper and Gabriel threw shadows in the yellow glow of the cockpit before him, and the enormous wings extended out beyond him dark and reassuring on both sides.

The stars were brilliant and foreign and extended undiminished to the cloud line. Every so often Hirsch’s head appeared in the glow of the smallish astrodome in front of the cockpit, taking a fix with the sextant. The plane tipped and rocked smoothly. His toes curled and flexed in the sheepskin linings. St. Elmo’s fire shimmered and glowed furtively around the wingtips and propellers. Hirsch intruded on the interphone in a low voice to give new headings.

Still hours from first light or landfall in Ireland, Bryant had felt completely happy in a world all those back home could never know. Below, everyone but pilots and navigator slept, deep in sheepskin jackets with collars up, curled around parachutes and duffels. Above, Bobby Bryant rode high in the cold dark air in his glass bubble under the stars and watched Paper Doll all around him sweeping toward Ireland, across the darkness, skimming the fluid and onrushing ceiling below, the smoothed and ever-changing clouds a ghostly topography.

They woke him with a flashlight, the glare harsh in the darkness. Men were making startled and angry sounds and the orderly on wake-up duty was going from bed to bed uncovering faces and giving blanketed legs a hard shove. He called the briefing time, 0330, in a clear and tired voice, without malice. The lights flicked on and off. Men cursed and thrashed under bedding and someone down the line of steel bunks, dreaming or awake, called Sylvie, Sylvie, don’t you go away now.

Bryant stretched, miserable. Bean lay as if stunned. Lewis sat on the side of his bunk with his feet on the floor and his hands on his face. Bryant could feel the shock of the cold on Lewis’s soles. Metal lockers were slamming and johns flushing. Snowberry was calling, “Oh, Mama, can’t we fight in the daytime?”

Piacenti went by with a towel over his head, fumbling with his kit. The far end of the hut remained dark and quiet, the other crew, not flying today, ordered and still, as if breathing or movement might give them away, children hoping the heavy snowfall has canceled school. The last time, too, this crew had not gone when they had, and Bryant remembered one of the guys off the hook guffawing like a loon in the dark.

They were angry and quiet at the latrine, annoying one another in the limited space around the sinks. They stood in their underwear and flying boots, warming their feet in the sheepskin lining and shuffling from mirror to can. Only Snowberry was somewhat cheery, remarking on the cold. Bean blinked repeatedly and tottered around like someone coming out of anesthetic.

Bryant dressed slowly, shivering, with razors still ringing faintly on the sinks in the uneven light. Beside him Bean was having trouble with the knot of his tie. When he finished, the knot was badly shaped and off-center and he pulled on a thick Army issue sweater, a dismal pea green in the electric light. Around his neck he crossed and recrossed a silk scarf — his lone Red Baron gesture — stitched from a salvaged parachute. He grinned.

An Order of Dressing had been stenciled on the wall near them:

1. Underclothing.

2. Uniform.

3. Trousers (folded inside boots).

4. Jacket (slightly open at top).

5. Boots (outside trousers).

6. Oxygen mask (lines clear).

7. Hood (skirt inside jacket).

8. Gloves.

A number of parodies were outlined beneath it. Snowberry’s Order of Defecating was a general favorite, but Bryant did not resent any system of checks, however ridiculous. He patted the pockets of his overalls to reassure himself that what he had carefully packed the night before still remained, and joined the crowd shuffling outside to clamber onto the open backs of the trucks for the drive to the mess hall. They sat with legs hanging and swaying from the back, quieted by the hiss and spray of the mud from the trucks’ tires. It was misting and the mud seemed more difficult than usual for the trucks and drivers. Someone closer to the cab mentioned the possibility of a scrub, and Lewis told him to shut the fuck up. At this point going and not going were both miserable prospects; a scrub meant the long emotional unwinding, all of this for nothing, and no progress toward the magic total of twenty-five missions which established a tour. And speaking about a scrub was sure to produce one.

At the extended breakfast tables they were served coffee which tasted faintly alkaline in warm, thick mugs. And toast and powdered GI eggs cut into squares and topped with a small floweret of grated cheese. The color and texture were unappetizing. Bryant ate without speaking. Bean looked ill and rubbed his neck tenderly. Piacenti ate all of his food and drank all of his coffee and sat quietly with his hands on both sides of his plate.

It was still dark when they filed into the briefing room, an oversized Nissen hut. They sat on narrow wooden folding chairs, feeling gradually more frightened and more excited. There was a low platform before them facing the rows of chairs, lit by theatrical spotlights hung from a steel beam overhead. Near the front it was very hot and near the rear it was cold. The middle seats were in demand. A staff sergeant from Plum Seed held a brown and white puppy slack in his arms, the puppy’s ears curled back in apprehension. Bryant thought briefly of Audie, who’d taken to sleeping in the backs of jeeps in the motor pool. Once she’d been discovered by two captains only after they’d reached London, when they’d tried to pile their dates into the back. Some of the guys called her Stowaway Canine.

The CO spoke briefly of the dangers of collision after takeoff and during assembly in such weather, and reported that the chances of mid-air collision had been assessed as two planes in a thousand. Someone from the back excused himself and wondered aloud if the CO had any idea which two.

They crowded before their lockers and tumbled the final layers of outerwear — lined leather jackets and pants — into piles that shifted together at their feet. Oxygen hoses coiled into sleeves and interphone cords snagged on gloves. They sorted hurriedly through their equipment as though Paper Doll were priming to leave without them, and wore and carried everything to more waiting jeeps. They overloaded the jeeps until they looked, in the gloom, to be a convoy of college pranksters, and rode to the revetments and Paper Doll in the dark, Lewis swinging way out on a running board, bouncing with each jolt in the darkness. They called out as they passed their plane and the driver executed a flamboyant turn and jerked to a stop. They piled out, dumping their equipment into heaps, and the truck shifted gears and roared off, its light jouncing through the mist toward the other 17’s farther down the line.

Tuliese was poking carefully around beneath the number two engine. The sky was paling to the east and it was beginning to feel like morning. They gathered around Hirsch expectantly, and he went over in subdued detail the navigational data, just when and how they would end up where. Bryant ran through his series of checks with Gabriel and Cooper, gazing at his own panel and over their shoulders into the cockpit at the rows of lit-up information. Beyond the cockpit the nearby windsocks emerged like ghosts and flapped energetically, and water tracked and veined the Plexiglas. They were going to scrub, Gabriel theorized disconsolately. They were so socked in they couldn’t even see the tower. Bryant climbed to his perch in the dorsal turret and looked around. He could make out only the dull glow and occasional flashes from I Should Care , less than a plane length away. “If they send the flares up, we won’t see them anyway,” he murmured to himself.