Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

They had been badly frightened and were glad to be among the first to land, an hour later. They were standing outside of Paper Doll waiting for the jeeps when Lemon Drop came in with a crushed tail from a collision somewhere in the clouds, its engines straining, the emergency trucks clanging, and Lemon Drop swung to the right as it swept in over the tarmac, hesitating with its left wing dipped, and then that wing caught the concrete and the immense plane smashed and concertinaed as they watched, a body cartwheeling out.

The radio operator survived. There was no fire. The plane had shattered into pieces spread over the runway like a junkyard. They had sprinted over to help the emergency crews, and Lewis and Bryant had come across in the cockpit section only the co-pilot’s flying boot, wedged beneath a rudder pedal, a bone jutting up from within like the stalk of an immature flower. When the shock had worn off, Bryant’s first clear thought, lying on his bunk, was that they were all dying like ants, or pets, or foreigners — they were all dying now as part of a routine.

He lay still. When he woke he was damp. The hut was gloomy and he guessed he had missed dinner. Something nearby smelled like aluminum. On the bunk beside him Snowberry lay face into the pillow with his hands hanging together off the edge like a victim of an exotic torture. Lewis was on his own bunk beyond, shifting his rear to test the sounds of various farts. Piacenti sat upright with his legs over the side and his head in his hands. It looked to Bryant like a training film illustration of Low Morale.

“I want to go home,” Snowberry said. His voice came from deep within the pillow.

“For serious drinking the boys had a table the shape of Texas. Cut it out of sheet metal,” Lewis said. He had spent his leave with friends in the 92nd. “We were playing Drink the Cities. We were on Galveston or Houston and somebody said, Toast. There was that point when no one knew what to drink to, and some little gunner who’d had his nose smashed over Aachen said, Yo Momma. It was just right.”

Snowberry had not moved and it looked to Bryant as if he’d stopped breathing. Lewis was chewing on a tightly rolled piece of paper and did not seem to be deriving pleasure from his story. He had a photo of Gene Tierney over his bed, under a handwritten sign that said Do Not Hump , and he was stroking her behind absently with his hand in his flying glove. “Now this may be a bunch of guys who appreciate the grotesque no more than seven seconds running in their whole life. But I swear I do love to see the forces come together.”

“I was figuring it out, on the ride in,” Snowberry said after a silent and dismal pause. “I don’t think we can go to chow anymore without fifteen percent casualties.”

“The last big party we had,” Lewis said, “it was after a big mission. We had WAAF’s and WAAC’s and Red Cross Girls and Wrens and local girls, you know, nice girls, and they were all standing around or sitting in these little groups. We kept thinking, how’d we get so lucky? Why are there so many girls here? Then it hit us: they were all the dates of the missing guys. We’d lost eight planes. Eighty guys. They’re all standing around, all dressed up.”

“Big night for sloppy seconds,” Piacenti said.

“One little girl musta started getting dressed four hours before she came. She was at a table with some other girls and they were ignoring her, you know, trying to at least have a good time. She was crying. I went over and talked to her.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Piacenti said. He believed Lewis to be a real tail hound.

“I told her it was just arithmetic,” Lewis said gently, as if the subject had been inevitable and infinitely dreary. “If each group has to do X number of missions and loses Y number of men with each mission, how soon before all the original men are history?”

“I worry about fire,” Piacenti said. “You know, you’re caught inside and there’s fire.”

Lewis chewed and the paper moved around his mouth like a toothpick. “This guy in the 92nd had this photo of all the squadron Forts lined up the week he’d arrived. He showed it to me? All of them are gone now. None left. You ever wonder why they don’t have battle-weary B-17’s pulling things around?”

He spat the paper high above the bunk in a startling parabola. “It’s simple, Dick Ott used to say. You’re in a game and you need to score twenty-five. Before you run into the Glass Mountain.”

The Glass Mountain was a squadron term for fatal and spectacular disasters in the skies, as in, This or that ship ran into the Glass Mountain. It had to do with the effect achieved when a heavy bomber was hit by flak while flying straight and level.

“Roasting to death,” Piacenti repeated. He shivered, and rubbed his neck. “That’s what really scares me.”

“Think of it like the Brits,” Lewis counseled. “You know. They talk about it like polo or something. These are just the single elimination playoffs.”

“I was talking to Hirsch,” Bryant said. “He was saying nothing was haphazard, you know? and that if you had all the figures, you could have predicted—”

“ Everything is haphazard,” Lewis said with vehemence. “You don’t predict nothing. I blow up your house, you tell me which way all the pieces are going to fall.”

“But don’t you think—”

“Shut up,” Lewis said. “You give me a headache. Don’t open your mouth.”

“I want to go home,” Snowberry said into the pillow. “I’m tired of this war.”

There was no response. The principal sound in the metal hut became the squeaking of Piacenti’s bunk as he scratched himself with an annoying industry. Bryant closed his eyes and nursed his humiliation, imagining Lewis gloating, imagining various forms of comeuppance.

Nothing was on for the next day. In the middle of the night he was aware that Snowberry was awake, and when he got up in dull insomniac frustration to go to the can, Snowberry followed. He sat on the can just for a place to sit.

“Some night,” Snowberry said. He ran water on his hands and looked at it.

Bryant was hours past answering. He fancied the water beneath him was rippling quietly in the bowl.

Snowberry produced his little red journal, opening to a marked page. He began reading after settling in with his back to the wall, his lips every so often forming ghostly words. Bryant rose and hoisted his shorts and returned to his bunk.

In the dark, vague shapes telescoped toward and away from him. He followed elusive ribbon-like creatures he hoped were temporary retinal imperfections of some sort until he had to get up, and hissing in frustration he lowered his feet to the floor and padded back to the latrine, concentrating dimly on some notion of a drink of water.

Snowberry was asleep, still seated upright, swaying with tiny starts like a doddering grandfather. Bryant sat beside him and when he didn’t wake extended a finger slowly and touched his nose. He didn’t stir. He waggled his fingers grimly before Snowberry’s face. His journal was opened on his lap. Bryant picked it up and began reading without high hopes. He skipped a section on Frances Langford. The next sections were drafts of letters.

This whole thing has really been something in terms of showing me the world and how different everyone is. Before the service I’d never met anyone from other places and now I know guys from Rhode Island and Ohio, and I’ve met guys from Texas and New Mexico and places like that. I always think about what Dad used to say about people from upstate and stuff, and I wonder what he would’ve thought about this crowd.

I eat good. The chow here is really good for the most part though everybody gripes about it all the time. I guess it’s something you’re supposed to do in the service. You can’t believe how important food is here. If Mom knew she certainly wouldn’t worry on that score. Guys’ll sit around and just talk about eating and never change the subject. Guys are always talking about how their mother made this or that, and everyone listens like their lives depend on it. Sebastian Piacenti, one of our waist gunners I told you about, has this knack for talking about his mother’s cooking so that the guys can almost smell it. He went on the other day in the jeeps after a mission about this veal dish with tomatoes that had the guys moaning and biting their hands.