Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Lewis had volunteered to call the start. Snowberry whinnied and snorted impatiently, and his rider giggled with delight. After several intentional false starts Lewis cried “Bang!” and they were off in a tumbling rush, Bryant feeling the shocks in his arms as he jounced forward. There was a good deal of shouldering and the riders shrieked happily as the mounts falling behind grabbed the feet or calves of those ahead and were kicked in retaliation. Snowberry elbowed Bryant and took a big lead heading into the wide curve around the engines, splaying maniacally through the turn like a crab. Bryant accelerated on skinned knees and palms and lowered a shoulder into the turning Snowberry and caught him broadside, both riders screaming and laughing, and Snowberry crashed into the gallery lining the racetrack and only kept his balance by knocking over two girls and a gunner drinking soda who’d been facing the other way. The boy flew off his back but kept hold on his neck, and Snowberry came after him furiously, pawing the ground and gobbling distance while the boy clung to his neck like an absurd version of a weight handicap and tried desperately to regain his footing and climb back on.

Bryant called No fair! No fair! He’s off! but Snowberry was covering ground like Man O’ War, the boy by now more or less back in the saddle. Ahead of them Hirsch hit a grease slick with both palms and skidded flat out on his chest before tumbling his rider off to the side, and someone ahead of him crossed the finish line. With Snowberry almost on top of him, Bryant gave it a last burst of acceleration looking for Place or Show, but Snowberry dove in frustration and caught him around the thighs, spilling the four of them like colliding skaters short of the finish line.

Robin and Jean helped collect the wounded and dispense Cokes.

“You were marvelous, darling,” Jean said, helping Snowberry brush off his Santa suit. His knees were black with grease. She wore her red hair swept up on both sides and her skin seemed thick, like rind. “I thought the way you stood up to this bully was simply wonderful.”

Snowberry brushed his chin with the back of his hand and scowled in Hollywood pain. “The story you’ve just seen,” he said, “and the characters in it, are fictional. But acts of courage such as these are occurring day after day, in Europe and the Pacific, as Allied fighting men and women stand tall against aggression wherever it’s found and refuse to say Uncle. Or even meet Uncle. Without their noble inspiration, something somewhere would have been impossible—”

“Such a cynic,” Robin scolded. “And hardly old enough to know the meaning of the word.”

“I know what it means, Mrs. Weisenheimer,” he said. “It means someone who can tell the future.”

Audie was cruising the food tables and thumping into the legs consistently, unaccustomed to the new arrangement. She was pulling in a great deal of attention and very little food from the children. She sat and begged from Lewis until Lewis found an egg of unknown antiquity in the bottom of the box sent over from the mess and cracked it over the dog’s head. Audie sat unaffected at first, her cloudy eyes like the portraits of Lee or Stonewall Jackson, while the albumen slid mercury-like from the crown of her head. The children loved it. Bryant always found the dog’s foolish and inappropriate dignity heartening.

“What kind of person humiliates blind animals for sport?” Robin wondered.

“Tail gunners from Dayton, Ohio, I’d guess,” Snowberry suggested. “Who’ve reenlisted.”

Another game evolved while they looked on, a guessing game which evoked great shouts and un-English arguing from the children.

“It was really very sweet of you to do this,” Robin said.

“It was Gordon’s idea, the whole thing,” Bryant said.

“They know,” Snowberry said. “I told them.”

Jean kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It means so much to the children. I think they see you as superheroes.”

“Not a view to which their parents always subscribe,” Robin said.

The party was breaking up. They joined the others to help with the distribution of candy and paper squadron patches.

Snowberry handed a patch with a double candy ration to Colin and heaped a banana on the pile in his hands. Colin thanked him so profusely he turned away, reddening.

Bryant loaded Keir up. The boy seemed dazed and his grip unreliable, so Bryant put the patch and the Baby Ruths in his pockets and let him hold the fruit. He thanked them in a small voice and Robin asked, leaning over him, what he liked best. “Juice from home,” he said.

The children were then piled back into the trucks, clutching their loot as though they expected all of this to be rescinded at any moment. Robin and Jean’s truck was among the last to leave, and they waved once and disappeared into the interior. The men lingered over clean-up and Bryant took a bucket of water to Audie, who had found a quiet corner and was lapping up some spilled soda she’d nosed out. Hirsch held her collar while Bryant scrubbed. She lowered her head helplessly and submitted, quivering in expectation of further indignities, while Bryant thought of the children’s faces.

They endured ground training sessions that were time-filling and redundant. They were mustered out in front of the briefing hut in a drizzle to listen to a lecture on behavior while intoxicated, relations with the locals, and incidents of petty theft. They went back over aircraft recognition, this time with a glum Bean singled out to hold small wooden models at various distances from those being tested. It was especially galling to Lewis that they were still studying aircraft recognition — his suggested technique was to shoot out of the sky anything which wasn’t a B-17 that approached within range — and not working on aerial gunnery, or on tightening the combat boxes. The Ju88 ambush on the return flight from Hamburg had spooked the brass, though, so they were back to naming silhouettes in the dark. One of the lowest percentile scores came on what turned out to be a Ju88. The irony put them in a horrible mood.

At the third session a fight broke out between a tail gunner and a dorsal gunner over the real Ju88’s — over who should have spotted them first — and the tail gunner, a medium-sized tech sergeant from Peoria named Theobald, knocked out a couple of the teeth of the dorsal gunner. The dorsal gunner had gone down on one knee beside Bryant and Lewis, cupping his mouth with trembling care, and when the lights had been switched on, Bryant had been arrested by the two teeth on his desk top like irregular pearls, dotted with jewel-like blood.

They snoozed through an early morning session on hygiene (“ Hygiene ,” Lewis exclaimed when he saw the topic posted. “Bean picks his nose and eats it”) and tried intermittently to concentrate on an afternoon marathon having to do with ditching in the water.

The first image which came up on the overhead projector once the room was darkened was that of an entire 17 crew minus pilot and co-pilot crammed into the radio compartment, body to body, in crash position. The presentation was clearly out of sequence, and the image faded from the screen.

“Fairies!” someone shouted triumphantly. The tail, ball, and waist gunners’ crash positions involved lying on their sides chest to back, nut to butt, as Lewis characterized so many military lines, and though the subjects’ arms remained primly at their sides, the crush did make things look comically intimate.

“Is that your hand?” someone else called.

The images reappeared, apparently now correctly ordered. The first sheet read: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A BOMBER IS FORCED DOWN AT SEA.

“Not a very military title,” Snowberry commented, next to Bryant.