Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

“It’s a good idea, sir,” Cooper said. He so rarely spoke, the rest of the crew assumed in this case he was sucking up to Gabriel. “I think they think back home that guys like Clark Gable are flying the Forts.”

“Clark Gable is flying Forts,” Lewis said. “He’s in the 351st.”

“Imagine if they knew back home that we were in charge of things?” Snowberry said.

Ciervanski made a show of getting ready, waiting for them to quiet down or for Gabriel to bring them into line. Bryant tried to help. He liked Ciervanski, though they were expected to display a certain distaste for officers.

“I heard from a guy in the 351st that Gable is actually a good officer,” Willis Eddy said. “Though he don’t actually fly the Forts.”

“I heard that,” Cooper agreed.

“Which one of you is the youngest?” Ciervanski said. He had apparently given up waiting for Gabriel.

“Snowberry,” Gabriel said.

Ciervanski wrote that down. “How old are you?”

“Ah, eighteen,” Snowberry said.

“He looks very young for his age,” Gabriel said. When Ciervanski looked at him, he nodded helpfully.

“He has a twin brother who’s much younger,” Lewis added.

Ciervanski scribbled something down and smiled to let them know he was in on the joke. He went on writing.

“Whaddaya want to know?” Snowberry asked. There was a hint of anxiety in his voice — Bryant imagined him envisioning the headline Underage Gunner Wants to Be in the Fight —and he raised up a bit in his seat to try and decipher what the captain was writing. “I was born in August nineteen-twenty-something,” he said.

Ciervanski asked if his parents were proud of him.

“My dad’s dead,” Snowberry said. “My mom is, I guess.”

The captain scribbled, dissatisfied. “Let me open this up to all the guys,” he said. “You boys’re just starting out. First real rugged mission recently. How’d it strike you? What’re your feelings about combat? What sort of advice would you pass on to green crews?”

They were silent. Gabriel looked at each of them, trying to force an answer.

“I don’t think we’re ready to be giving advice, sir,” Lewis said quietly.

Ciervanski nodded. They could see in his expression the dawning and dismal sense that his pet project might have to be scrapped, or at the very least carried through with another crew. He tried again.

“Are there any outstanding incidents you’d relate?”

“Outstanding incidents,” Eddy mused. “Well, once I saw an Arab eat a sandwich made of K rations and shaving cream.”

Ciervanski closed his pad, and laughed, which relieved them. “Well, Lieutenant, your boys may be ready for Fred Allen but I’m not sure they’re ready for Impact . It’s like trying to interview the Ritz Brothers.”

Gabriel got up from his chair. His face indicated his understanding that his chance to be the skipper of a more famous aircrew was slipping away. He gestured at Lewis. “I think the men are a little, you know, hesitant, sir, and don’t want to blow their own horn. Sergeant Peeters here took a 20mm incendiary in the chest, in the flak vest, on the last raid, and lived to tell about it.”

Ciervanski looked at him sadly, as if he had offered a bowel movement as news. “All right,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

Lewis related the incident with no elaboration.

Ciervanski wrote it all down dutifully. “We’ll get a shot maybe of you wearing the vest and holding the shell,” he said without enthusiasm.

He dismissed them soon after. There had been further silences, additional forlorn questions, spartan answers. Gabriel apologized for all of them. Ciervanski waved off the apology gracefully and said, “Maybe it’s tough getting everybody together like this. Bad idea. Tell you what, Lieutenant. I’ve still got an hour and a half. What do you say I wander around with some of the men in smaller groups and talk to them informally?”

So he ended up with Lewis and Bryant under the nose of Paper Doll. Lewis was explaining what he believed to be the weak areas of the Fortress’s defensive fire umbrella. Gabriel drifted by in the background, keeping a helpless eye on them, worried, Bryant knew, that Ciervanski was talking to exactly the wrong person.

“Who’s that?” Ciervanski asked, pointing to the Plexiglas nose. “Last-minute replacement?” He chuckled. Audie was sitting upright in the bombardier’s seat. Her nose misted the Plexiglas, and her blind and patient lack of comprehension parodied the burned-out look of twenty-mission bombardiers.

Ciervanski offered around cigarettes and then Oh Henry!s. “Look, boys,” he said. “I figure the only way this job could do anything more than keep me busy, do anything for anyone at all, is if I try to get the real story out.”

Lewis and Bryant pondered that. Above them Audie seemed to be surveying the airfield, chin and tongue bobbing lazily to the rhythm of her panting.

Ciervanski sighed. “Well, I humped all the way out here, talked my CO into this idea in the first place, and chewed up a day and a half on this project. I think when I file this the cream chipped beef is going to hit the fan.”

“It may just be us,” Bryant suggested.

Ciervanski stood and brushed off the seat of his pants. His belly shook and he puffed. “You boys take care,” he said. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” Gabriel had seen the leave-taking and was heading their way. “Here comes your lieutenant,” he said. “I gotta break the news to him that you guys won’t be famous this year.”

“I think he already knows, sir,” Lewis said.

Bryant’s father worked for the railroad, and had been able to keep his job through the Depression. He didn’t share much with Bryant and one Christmas told him, That’s all you get; and that’s about right.

Once in a while they went hunting in the woods of eastern Connecticut, a biographical detail Bryant could never bring himself to reveal to Lewis. He was never allowed to handle the gun, his father tramping along with the.22 in the crook of his arm, oblivious to the clouds of insects which drove his son into a quiet frenzy of waving and slapping. His father was a poor shot as well, always sending squirrels and opossum skittering out of range with his first attempt. One of the dogs, Toby, or Corky, or the malevolent Snapper, would come along, adding to his father’s frustration and Bryant’s misery. The one time Tippi, Bobby’s favorite, had come, the dog had performed so miserably — not seeing a squirrel it almost tripped over, even after his father had taken the dog’s head and oriented it in the right direction — that his father had dragged it back to the car and locked it in for the rest of the day, and Bryant had walked and walked thinking of poor Tippi, shamefaced and only half understanding, gazing out behind the windshield after them into the woods.

When Snowberry felt particularly low he liked to, as he put it, swap dad stories. He said he missed his dad a good bunch. Bryant did, too, he was surprised to discover, though he felt bad he had few stories such as Snowberry seemed able to draw on endlessly, stories of dads and kids having fun. He treated it as a failure of memory when he could and chastised himself for not holding close to the best things now that he was away from home.

“I wish my dad were still around,” Snowberry said. “It’s tough when you don’t have a pop.”

Bryant agreed it must be. They talked about the World’s Fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere, the Helicline. All the razzmatazz, Snowberry said, all the really wild stuff about how great things were going to be. Snowberry had gone with his father twice; Bryant had visited once on the train with his uncle Tom, the military enthusiast. His uncle had hectored him throughout the trip about the importance of what they were viewing until Bryant had begun to view the whole thing as pretty much ruined.