Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

“What happened to the biscuits?” Snowberry complained. “The only thing I liked was the biscuits.”

“No biscuits on game days,” Lewis said. “No beans, either. The gas expands at high altitude. Guys fart like rifle shots. Take a balloon half filled up to twenty thousand feet, it’s filled. Take it to thirty thousand, boom.”

Snowberry looked at his eggs with distaste.

They were checked into the briefing room by MP’s with white leggings filthy from the mud. The gunners sat in a line on benches facing the curtained mission board and immediately checked the yarn pulleys alongside it. A good deal was missing. As they noticed, they became even less happy. The more yarn was missing, the more was on the map and the longer the trip.

They were shoulder to shoulder in the soft and heavy flight jackets, and the smells after the morning air were eye-watering: Kreml hair oil, shaving lotion, sweat, cigarettes. Wet dog, toward the back. “This place is always pure armpit,” Snowberry groused.

Lewis leaned across them and gestured toward the curtain. “I love this. Big security production. In a few minutes we find out what the Nazis’ve known all week.” Men around them coughed and stomped their feet as though to keep warm, and hushed their voices in anticipation like a parody of a theater audience.

The CO entered on schedule and they stood in a noisy mass. He had them sit down again — Lewis blew out his breath heavily, exasperated at the suspense — and nodded to the intelligence officer, who pulled the curtain. The red yarn line ran to Hamburg, and an adjacent enlargement showed U-boat yards.

There were scattered boos. Someone in the back held up a civilian gas conservation sign: Is This Trip Really Necessary?

The overhead projector flashed diagrams and photos of the U-boat yards. Intelligence laid out the route, and the expected reaction from fighters and flak. The officer had written, “Out-lying Flak Batteries Dwarfish by Comparison,” the “Dwarfish” hyphenated at the end of the board, and someone from the back asked in all sincerity, “What’s a Dwar Fish?”

“Don’t worry about the flak,” Snowberry whispered to Bryant. “Official word is that it’s only a deterrent.”

“I’m still trying to figure that one out,” Lewis said.

Operations and Planning provided some last-minute operational data, and Stormy talked about the expected weather changes to and from the city. He drew large billowy cumulus clouds on his own chalkboard to illustrate the expected 20,000-foot ceiling.

They were reminded not to underestimate the enemy, a bit of advice they found as gratuitous as anything they had heard since their induction. The gunners were reminded to harmonize at 250 yards, and to remember the bullet streams would converge at that distance and then begin to diverge.

The crews were glum and attentive. They always half hoped for unimportant targets, targets which would not stir the Germans into anything more than their usual hostility.

The CO announced the time and they all set their minute hands to it, and he called “Hack!” and they started their watches again.

“Good luck,” he said. “Remember what’s at stake.”

“What?” someone asked.

The group broke up, navigators heading off in one direction, bombardiers and radio ops to pick up their information sheets, the gunners to the flight line lockers. Piacenti, Ball, Lewis, Snowberry, and Bryant walked in a line carrying parachutes and flak vests to the armament shop to pick up their guns. They piled everything into two jeeps and rode to Paper Doll minutes ahead of everyone else.

The guns were slid into their steel frames and locked in the stowed position for takeoff. The turrets were turned to face the rear. The five of them stood beside the plane, checking the layers of gear and waiting for the rest of the crew. Bryant hunched near the enplaning hatch on the fog-colored underside and dandled his finger around the connecting ring of his oxygen hose. Lewis went off into the mist a few feet and urinated through the circle of his thumb and forefinger.

Gabriel arrived with everyone else and gathered the group in a circle for some final instructions. He talked about the need to communicate on the bogies but to otherwise stay off the interphone. He cautioned Snowberry and Bryant to keep alert for fighters at twelve o’clock high and low, and said some of the scuttlebutt was there’d be a big diversionary raid which might tie up a lot of interceptors to the south. Snowberry was wearing a button he’d gotten from the New York World’s Fair, which read I Have Seen the Future. Gabriel peered at it, and asked if there were any questions. His cap had been pummeled and soaked in water to affect the fifty-mission crush, and when he moved, his unconnected oxygen hose and interphone cable flapped and gestured.

No one else spoke. They lined up to enplane.

“Do the bear dance, Bean,” Snowberry said, and Bean startled Bryant by hopping from one foot to another, back and forth, looking for all the world in his heavy gear and flight suit like a dancing bear. They had all seen this before, and laughed affectionately. Bryant had not. He felt suddenly he was outside even this group. When had Bean started a bear routine? Who had encouraged it?

Piacenti, climbing in ahead of him, turned and displayed an old orange warning tag from the Norden bombsight, and grinned. He slipped it inside his flight jacket and clambered up into the hatch.

Bryant hesitated before the opening, having missed the point.

“Do-it-yourself superstition,” Lambert Ball said behind him. “Can’t beat it.”

They individually ran their preflight checklists from their dark stations, calling in over the interphone. Bryant stood at the flight engineer’s panel and then at Gabriel and Cooper’s shoulders, double-checking their run-through.

They waited. A full hour passed. Bryant felt as if he were wearing a constricting and damp pile of laundry. “Stormy, if you’re wrong, we’re gonna kick your fucking ass,” Lewis murmured over the interphone. They heard rain patter lightly on the fuselage and everybody groaned.

“Isn’t this weather something?” Piacenti cried. He sounded stuffed up. “Sun for the tail and rain for the nose.” Their chatty informality over the interphone was not official operating procedure, but among the crews a certain amount of radio sloppiness was considered masculine.

Bryant climbed into the padded sling in the dorsal turret for a look around. Across the tarmac he could see shining water, broken by birds.

Above them a green flare arced rapidly and crookedly away and immediately the cockpit was furious with activity, Gabriel taking Cooper quickly through the checklist: Alarm bell/ Checked, Master switches/On, Carburetor filter/Open, and Bryant slipped back to his panel to check the engine status. From there Gabriel ordered him back to the bomb bay to the manual shut-off valves of the hydraulic system, so they could check the hydraulic pressure. “No hydraulic pressure, we’re back to Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal,” Gabriel liked to say. Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal was simple: the B-17, Lewis said, was not lighter than air, and when it came down for the wrong reason, it came down hard.

He could hear the whine of the inertia starter in the wing and the engines caught and fired, and the plane shook with the sound and the concentrated horsepower and Tuliese yanked the chocks away. They began to inch forward. His last glimpse up through the dorsal Plexiglas before resuming his takeoff position behind the pilot was of the mist lifting obligingly like a gray theater curtain.

They taxied behind the other Forts, a long parade of dull green ships, along the perimeter track to the end of one of the short runways, and waited, locking the tail wheel. Four thousand or so feet away were hedges, and a low fence. The planes were nose to tail, foreshortened enough from Bryant’s vantage point to seem an awesome and comic traffic jam.