Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Another jeep swung by and stopped and a voice from it called out a fifteen-minute delay. “Do you register, pilot?” the voice said.

“Chew my thing, Sergeant,” Gabriel called from the cockpit.

“Thank you, sir,” the voice said. “We don’t chew things.”

With the extra time Bryant ran through additional power plant checks with Tuliese, who seemed unusually defensive and unhappy, and with nothing further to do left the plane and crouched next to Snowberry, who had long since made himself comfortable on a small pile of parachutes. He was surprised to feel how tired he was already.

Stormy, the weather officer, came by on foot, with extra boxes of candy in his new unofficial role as morale officer. He was an earnest and gently funny man, who took his inability to predict the weather with any accuracy seriously, and they liked him. He seemed to genuinely wish he could fly with them, and to genuinely worry about them. He had instituted the tradition of the Living Safety Deposit Box with their crew and the crew of I Should Care , holding on to their valuables during a mission. Valuables turned out to the aircrews to mean only watches and letters, and Stormy had just come from I Should Care and had eight watches on his arm. The pilot and the navigator kept theirs. Bryant peeled his from his wrist, and handed it over. Snowberry did the same. They declined the Baby Ruths with thanks.

They could hear other jeeps, and headlights illuminated parts of Seraphim and I Should Care and swept toward them. One of the jeeps hit a bump and the beams jerked upward and down, as though fencing with the darkness.

“Lewis borrowed Tuliese’s jeep,” Snowberry commented. He was eating peanut brittle from his flight rations. “More ammo.”

The jeep roared up and jerked around with a rakish and dangerous tip. Lewis climbed out and started unloading boxes and loose belts of fifty-caliber ammunition.

“You’re going to kill somebody driving like that,” Cooper called from somewhere off in the darkness.

“I’m paid to kill somebody,” Lewis said. The cooling jeep made ticking and shuddering sounds.

“Is all that authorized, Lewis?” Stormy said, and Lewis told him to have sex with his mother.

“Back there in the tail I just want me, my flak vest, the armor plate, and all these fifty-caliber gewgaws,” he said.

They helped him ferry awkward and spiraling belts into the tail, and coiled them into every conceivable space, in and out of the storage boxes. When they had finished, Lewis gave them each an extra belt for their stations.

“There’s a reason you’re not supposed to do this, you know,” Snowberry said. “The tail’s gonna be so heavy we’re gonna end up leaving you behind.”

“That’s fine, too,” Lewis said. “One way or the other, I’ll get by.” He called to Tuliese and flipped the jeep keys in the crew chief’s general direction. They rang on the tarmac and Tuliese was left to hunt around in a crouch, moving in slow arcs like someone sweeping mines.

They waited in a small group, squatting and sitting. The B-17’s around them were becoming clearer and the runways faintly luminous. Various figures moved about.

“I’m going to write a war book someday, I think,” Bryant said. He thought again of his high school English teacher with her sketches of the Parthenon, and her assessment of him. His holster rode up the small of his back. “Only in this one no one’s going to get killed.”

Neither Lewis nor Snowberry chose to respond. Stormy wished them well and left. Cooper and Gabriel paced by, gazing worriedly down the runway.

Lewis shifted audibly on his pile of equipment. “You write a war book and no one gets killed,” he said. “I don’t know what you got, but it isn’t a war book.”

Snowberry sang disconnected bits of a Crosby song to himself, his voice too low to carry.

Piacenti was in the plane looking for something with a flashlight, like a prowler. He climbed out of the waist hatch and stood over them with his hands on his hips. “There’re bugs or something in the waist,” he reported. Mist drifted from his words. “Hornets.”

“Hornets,” Lewis said. “In England.” He sounded profoundly unhappy.

“Tell Bean,” Snowberry said. “He’s the bug man.”

“Check it out,” Bryant suggested softly. “See what they are.”

“Your ass,” Piacenti said. “I’m not going in there.” He blew on his hands.

Lewis said, “Isn’t this something? We’re ready to get killed, but not get stung by hornets.”

Hushed noises floating over from I Should Care sounded like someone straightening tool boxes, double-checking gear, doing something recommended and orderly and useful.

“My parents had this cabin once, on the Jersey shore,” Lewis said. Snowberry hummed softly. Bryant studied the morning light on the undersides of the clouds, annoyed with the prospect of a long story at this point and finding it difficult to listen. He was growing more convinced that a scrub was a near certainty.

“We used to run around over some back acres,” Lewis said, “us kids. Once, in the middle of these bushes, thick bushes, surrounded by trees, we found this ’34 Nash — green with green upholstery — just sitting there, with no roads out and no roads in and no way on God’s earth it could have gotten there. Perfect condition. There were leaves and stuff on it, of course. All the windows rolled up. Trees all around it, and these were big trees.”

It was clear enough now to make out the doors and Plexiglas canopies and turrets, and Willis Eddy in the bombardier’s station up front sneezed violently.

“I’ll tell you,” Lewis said. “No way of figuring it. We’re being tested every day, boy.”

Piacenti snorted. “Somebody gonna do something about these things?” he asked. He was peering tentatively into the waist, his weight on his heels.

“Maybe it was a bootlegger’s car, or something,” Snowberry suggested. It was the first indication he had been listening. “Some gangster left it there for the getaway. Al Capone.”

Why don’t they cancel it if they’re going to cancel it? Bryant thought. Instead of making us all sit around here like idiots.

“That’s the thing; there wasn’t anywhere to get,” Lewis said, standing and flexing a leg in front of him. “It was like the trees grew up after the car got there.”

He went in after the hornets, Piacenti following and Snowberry covering their rear. The plane was brightening and detail took on clarity. The fifteen-minute wait had long since passed. While they were inside the fuselage, shifting gear around in the search for the insects like someone rummaging through a closet, notification came to stand down, that the mission had been scrubbed. Bryant made futile and angry jerking motions with his hands down into the gravel and thought, How is Lewis going to get all that ammo back? He hated everything for being harder than it needed to be and sat with his legs spread before him like a child, winging loose gravel and small stones and whatever else his hands swept up from the tarmac at the gray space beneath the body of Paper Doll.

Later in the afternoon the sun came out to mock the entire enterprise, giving the ruts everywhere beside the hardstands and around the base buildings a dusty instability. Snowberry found him beneath a tree, watching the smallish clouds of dust drift from trafficked areas in the distance.

“Tuliese is working on the ball,” Snowberry said. He had chocolate or dirt on his chin. “You wanna come look?”

Bryant got up, officially interested, as flight engineer, with all mechanical problems having to do with Paper Doll. They crossed long empty warm-up areas. Some of the crew of Geezil II were playing football with a rugby ball. Bryant could hear one staff sergeant — Baird? — shouting Yah, yah, yah as he sprinted wide to turn the corner. His duds were greasy and worn in the seat.