Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Bryant agreed. “It’s like you just sit around, or you’re like Famous Walter,” he said.

Famous Walter had become famous, unhappily, as the Two Hour Replacement: having just arrived at the base he’d sat down to mess, been told he was needed as a last-minute replacement in the tail of Banshee , and had been killed by flak over Hanover. All they’d gotten in the mess was his first name. Someone else had finished his Spam.

Snowberry clunked his flying boots together at the toes. They were oversized enough to be his father’s. “God, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he said. “I thought they were the end. Girls die for fighter pilots. They only get wounded for us.”

“I was a Lindy nut,” Bryant said. “Were you a Lindbergh nut? He came and gave a speech in Providence and they sold little hats. I think it was about staying out of the war, but what did we care? It was Lindy.”

“Oh, boy,” Snowberry said. “I must’ve made two thousand Spirit of St. Louis ’s from those wooden Popsicle sticks. House was knee deep in Spirit of St. Louis’s. ”

“I used to play toy soldiers,” Bryant said. “The cardboard kind, with the wood bases. I had a little lead Spirit of St. Louis , used to fly over, strafe the soldiers. I used to have the guys go, ‘Look out! It’s Lindy! Aaah!’ No one stood up to the airplanes. Everyone did a lot of running and dying.”

“Like now,” Snowberry said. “The Krauts: ‘Bryant and Snowberry! Aaah!’”

They laughed. Bryant had a vision of flak crews in Germany chafing at the insult, crossing hairs over the belly of Paper Doll , and sobered.

“You’re all right, Bobby,” Snowberry said. “Lewis is tops, but …” he trailed off.

Bryant was grateful and slightly embarrassed, unsure what he was getting at. He cleared his throat.

“Anyway, I keep, like, a diary,” Snowberry said.

“I saw you working on it,” Bryant said.

“I know you read a lot and stuff.” Bryant read magazines in the day room. “I want to send some parts home to my folks, the best stuff. They’re always telling me to write and I never know what to say.”

“That’s nice, a diary,” Bryant said. The idea didn’t appeal to him.

“Here, you can look at it,” Snowberry suggested. He pulled it out of his back pocket. It was a smallish softcover. Bryant started to hand it back and protested it was private, but Snowberry assured him that it was all right, they were buddies, so Bryant was forced to open it.

The cover featured in red ink a battle-weary GI who’d apparently stopped to write beside a makeshift roadside sign. The sign said My War Diary. The book was already half full.

The margins were crammed with additions and helpful drawings and diagrams — how the arc of the tracers helped him lead a target in gunnery, what approaches he was responsible for defending from the belly. There was a cutaway drawing of Paper Doll , outlining the crew positions, entitled Our Plane.

He flipped to the back, the morning’s entry.

Hi again. Another f-ing (!) scrub. It’s terrible and now we’re all juiced up with nowhere to go. It always clears up later but by then it’s too late and everyone’s a real pain to be around. Lewis you can’t even go near. Trying to guess the weather is awful hard. And harder, I guess, for the weatherman (!) We call our base weather officer Stormy. Lewis says he uses a weejee (?) board. He’s a nice guy, though. It’s real bad for morale, a scrub: we fly eight missions on the ground for every one in the air, and it’s bad to get up and think you’re going to be a day closer to the end of your tour and then find out it’s all blooie.

He paged back to July and Training. There was a small sketch of a latrine with flies and curving lines above it.

I stink, though I’m getting better, everybody says so. I whipsaw everything like I’m using a garden hose and I squeeze off bursts that are too long. My training officer told me he was going to ration me, but he can’t, of course. I have to be through in the next week and a half or it’s washeroonie. I don’t think I’ll wash, though. On the flexibles me and another guy named Flynn flying tandem cut a tow target clear in half this morning, and that’s good work! The tow plane even had it dipping and weaving, like real Jerries.

I still like the idea of being a dentist. I talked to the guy who examined me at the induction center and he said I’d be looking at big money and mucho opportunity after the war and the government would help out in terms of school like I couldn’t believe. Mom’s nuts about the idea, of course, and wouldn’t she be surprised to hear we agree on something. Mom said Liz said I’d never do it because I’d have to wash my hands. Ha. Ha.

Snowberry was gazing lazily ahead, humming “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”

Bryant said, “You never said you had a sister.”

Snowberry looked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t.”

Bryant closed the book and stretched, his finger holding the place.

“Keep reading,” Snowberry said. “It gets better.”

I remember before Dad died we’d go camping out at Port Jefferson. Somebody owned the land and Dad didn’t care, though I never wanted to have a fire, I thought they’d come and start shooting. We went for my birthday once. I loved the woods and stuff. There were never any stores or lights and you didn’t have so much noise. We saw a shooting star. Dad said on my tenth birthday I saw a shooting star and on my first birthday I saw Babe Ruth clout number forty-six on his way to sixty, and he didn’t think if I lived to be a hundred I’d ever see the like of either again. Though of course I don’t remember the home run.

Bryant did some quick figuring, and confirmed Snowberry’s age as seventeen. He was underage, something everyone suspected and joked about.

He thought again with regret about how rarely he was able to remember the kind of father and son stories Snowberry always told, recognizing with a pang Snowberry’s references to the private jokes that seemed the code of a happy family. His only memory of a camping trip had involved a weekend in Block Island with his father. His father had always called it in an unpleasant way Our Only Night Out. He had had to go to the bathroom late the first night and had stumbled out of his bedroll and up the dune ridge. Above him, the night was coming down in curtains, silver and red and purple. He hadn’t been able to think of the word for it, and had called to his father, who’d come hurrying up the dune and then had stopped short and said, “The northern lights. For God’s sake.” But he had wrapped an arm around him.

He remembered it as their happiest time together, maybe their only happy time together. He remembered that they had fished and hadn’t caught anything, and that his father had said, “The buggers are unionized.” His father had pulled from an old pack some bread and a roll of provolone cheese that he called guinea cheese, and then had gone down to the cove sheltered by the dune ridge and had collected saltwater snails in a pan, a small black figure against the wavering light off the water. The snails had looked like little rounded black pebbles, and he had cooked them in saltwater and split them with Bryant. They had had twenty or so apiece, and had eaten them out of their shells with a pin. They had been terrible.

The next night they had had corn dogs and bluefish. They hung netting against mosquitoes on a crisscrossing pole thing he’d rigged up, on a wide flat sandy stretch at the bottom of the dunes on the west side of the island, away from the cliffs. His father had congratulated him on the netting arrangement. They sat at the water’s edge on huge driftwood twisted smooth into horror movie shapes and gutted the blues, the raspberry and clearish fish organs washing away in the rippling dark water. His father had popped a blue’s eye and it had floated a while in a strange blank way before sinking. His father had dipped the fish in some warm beer he’d carried in, and some corn meal, and they fried it over a fire they dug low in a sandy pit. His father had drunk quietly and consistently from a flask and Bryant could smell the rye on his breath. He remembered the rye and fish and saltwater smell. He remembered sleeping looking up through his netting and poles with all the mosquitoes locked out and the stars beyond.