Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

“‘You fiddle with my shrimp and then you turn me down,’” Lewis sang. “‘You know I can’t do nothin’ till my shrimp’s unwound.’”

“All right, can it,” Gabriel said. “I mean it.”

Bryant could see the cirrus clouds as ice crystals at this height, rippled and thin and extending for hundreds of miles. Around the tail the flight’s white contrail streams converged in a vanishing point like a burst of illumination.

“God a mighty,” he murmured. He felt a peculiar and foolish excitement and a pride in where he was and what he felt was about to happen.

Hirsch called in their position quietly. They were now all looking for fighters, 540 men in 54 airplanes. Bryant swiveled the turret slowly, searching through the polished perspex for the dots. He tried to concentrate, fighting the cold and the plane’s shaking and the erratic ghost flecks from the defects of his own eye. He tested a speck’s integrity by immediately shifting his eye; if the speck shifted with it, it was phony, a momentary unreliability. Bad peepers, Lewis said, killed more people than bad anything else.

Bryant slipped a flight glove off, and touched the gun triggers lightly. The cold metal seared him and he jerked his hand back and fumbled with his glove. He went on watching, his fingers burning with a steady and painful pulse. Cooper called another oxygen check. While they ran through it, each station calling in, Bryant sang to himself the lyrics of “Paper Doll” as some sort of talisman.

Lucky Me! and Milk Run had closed on either side and wallowed nearer, wingtips already alarmingly close to Paper Doll’s. He could see the dorsal gunner in Lucky Me! peering up to the east, a bunched scarf flashing white beneath his chin. They were closing the combat box, making it tighter to concentrate the defensive fire. Above him Geezil II floated down closer, the bubble of its ball turret still rotating slowly.

“Bandits! Bandits!” Lewis called. “Comin’ through past me! What the Christ are you guys lookin’ at?”

Two planes at two o’clock, someone else yelled. Four at two-thirty.

Bryant swiveled the turret around to the front right, his guns tracking over the outboard Wright Cyclone, and six or eight fighters flashed by underwing, gone before he could register them.

The flak was everywhere around them, billowing in round puffs with strings of larger shrapnel trailing downward like legs. He was sweating, he realized, spinning the guns in an attempt to follow the action, his ears filled with bandits being called in and curses.

He spun to face front and angled the guns up to catch an echelon of four fighters coming down across and through the flight, their wings winking light even at that distance. They began taking on features instantaneously and he could see colors, insignia, letters, radio masts, yellow noses, then they flashed past — Me-109’s, he understood. He turned the turret again, his gloves light on the controls, and a fighter leaped at him like an apparition, impossibly close, shocking him immobile, and was gone. Its squared wing seemed to have passed through his turret. The burnt powder smell was thick even through the oxygen mask: everyone else was firing, and Paper Doll was trembling with the power of the recoils. A Messerschmitt spiraled by the nose with pieces tumbling back from its wings.

The air burst right before them, it seemed, just above Hirsch and Eddy in the nose, and he could see red fire within the black cauliflower shape and the air jarred like water in a bowl. The shrapnel rang over the plane like someone hitting it with steel pipes and Bryant shook on his sling until the world came back to level in a long slow sway. He found himself looking through the Plexiglas at another echelon coming around again and finally came to, in some way, and swept his guns around and up and framed in the glass of his gunsight a fighter’s blinking wings as it grew toward him. The fighter was shooting at them, he could see, and the hits sounded around him like thunder and hail on his father’s tin shed, and he became aware of Gabriel screaming at him over the interphone to open up, for somebody to check on Bryant. The German’s tracers flipped and curved by and he hunched his shoulders in the turret instinctively. His thumbs squeezed and the guns deafened him and wrenched with recoil, and tracer streams wove out and toward the fighter which was already gone, flashing its half-S curve beneath them to loop back for another pass. He could hear and feel Snowberry below firing after him, and Lewis.

One Fortress from the flight was trailing smoke from two engines, and falling back. He couldn’t identify it, and didn’t have time. Even at that distance he saw holes stitch by magic in a line across the wing and upper fuselage, and the plane staggered in the air. Its gear fell, and it sheared away and slipped beneath his line of sight.

Another echelon came through, and everyone fired forward, Snowberry’s and Eddy’s and his own tracers braiding and coiling out toward the fighters, and he raced the turret around firing as they roared past in an attempt to track them.

He swept the turret the opposite way, feeling overloaded, overwhelmed. On the interphone Cooper called out bandits reforming ahead, Piacenti tracked one for Lewis, Ball was yelling something. Snowberry said, “My parents’ll kill me. I get killed now, my parents’ll kill me.”

A parachute went diagonally by, the man pulled at a crazy angle by the squadron’s prop wash.

Cooper and Hirsch announced the start of the initial point of the bomb run. From there to the main point of impact they’d be on automatic pilot, coupled to Eddy’s Norden bombsight, flying straight and level. The usual comparison was to metal ducks in a fairground gallery. Ahead of them the flak was concentrated into a barrage box in the area the flak gunners knew the formation would have to fly through. Bryant had heard it referred to as iron cumulus and now he saw it. The shells were all exploding at the same altitude — their altitude — and the detonations merged to form a low black anvil. The first planes of the flight were already pushing into it and he stared in wonder at their apparent survival even as the bursts approached and surrounded Paper Doll.

The plane shook and stayed level. The bursts were everywhere. They seemed to be standing still, not moving at all. The fighters had sheared off to let the flak take over. Eddy continually called Steady, Steady, until Bryant wanted to kill him. Beneath him he could hear Snowberry firing his guns in rage and frustration at flak gunners 20,000 feet below. Above him the bomb bay doors of Geezil II and Boom Town were opening, the inside racks and dark bomb shapes slowly becoming visible. He could hear the doors below him swinging open as well and felt the extra drag on the ship.

A burst over the tail blinded him and tore away metal in finger-like strips. He found himself refocusing on the now tattered vertical stabilizer and he heard someone yelling they were hit over the interphone. “It’s Lewis! It’s Lewis!” Snowberry yelled. “Lewis is hit!”

“I’m hit,” Lewis said.

“What do you want me to do?” Gabriel said. “Park it? Somebody check him out.”

Bryant slipped from his seat, trying to get stable footing below.

“Bombs away,” Eddy called. The plane bucked upward from the release of the weight, and Bryant found himself on his side.

“Bombs’re gone, it’s all yours, Lieutenant,” Eddy said, and the plane lurched as Gabriel retook flying control and wrenched it out of its level path, and Bryant fell again, onto his hands and knees. He struggled back through the catwalk over the open bomb bay to the radio room, and then to the waist position, leaning against the severity of the plane’s bank, past a curious Ball, and stopped when Piacenti emerged from the hatchway to the tail and made an open palm and thumbs up.