Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Snowberry then attempted, with limited success, Bryant judged, to recapture some of Piacenti’s magic. He skipped ahead.

The guy who wrote to ask for the picture of Sis is Harold Bean. He’s got a girl here but I guess things aren’t going so well between them, and I was really talking Sis up in front of him one day, so I guess he was sold. He’s a nice guy, I think, though Lewis rides him pretty hard. Lewis says Bean raises a crew’s buggeration factor — that’s the phrase we got from the Brits for chances of something going wrong — but I think he’s just pretty much like the rest of us. Maybe more so. We don’t want to let each other down, and I think we do a pretty good job.

Lewis thinks Bean’s getting jumpy and says you mark his words, he’ll end up in a flak home, but I think it’s more this thing with the girl, and the rotten luck the squadron’s been having. I worry more about Piacenti. I don’t know that much more about Bean. He’s from Pennsylvania, but I think he told you that. He’s a good-hearted guy. He’s not a wolf. I think he looks fine but Lewis likes to say he’s got a face like an unmade bed. I think he looks like the little guy in Lost Horizons. You know the one I mean?

I’m okay. I think we’re all pretty blue like I said right now. I’ve heard some great new stuff from Der Bingle on the Armed Forces Network, and some new Vera Lynn stuff on the English stations. Tell Sis I’ve been working on the harmonies.

I find myself daydreaming more than I used to, and I have to watch it, or the guys’ll think I’m ready for the flak farm, too. I have these other dreams, too, though I don’t think they’re going to last forever. The guys call dreaming like that pulling a lot of night missions. I have this one where there are German fighters all around us and my turret mechanism is like it has sand in it or something, and the gun controls are all floppy and loose. It gets me in a real sweat.

It seems like what we were taught and everything isn’t good enough to handle everything

The entry stopped. Bryant closed the book and woke Snowberry, getting him to his feet and leading him gently to his bunk, as if putting to bed a sleepy child on Christmas Eve.

It seemed to them that it had been decided to keep them flying missions until they were dead. They were informed at the morning briefing that the target of the day would be Kassel, and a lieutenant known to most of them as a good man and a steady co-pilot stood up and said with frightening calm that he was no longer willing to fly these goddamn things, and that he wanted out. When he refused to sit down, he was escorted from the room.

On the hardstand Hirsch and Gabriel alone seemed capable of smooth movement, the rest of the crew drooped and jerked like marionettes waiting for their turn to board. Bean was learning German phrases from the little sheet in his escape kit: Danke, Bitte. Zug. Schnellzug. Dritte Klasse.

Snowberry was white. “I’m not gonna make it,” he whispered to Bryant. “We were so cocky before. Why were we so cocky before?”

Bryant understood, he thought: It was as if the present situation represented an invited retribution.

“This paper pusher I met in London told me, ‘You want to make breakfast, you gotta break some eggs,’” Lewis said. He was blowing on his gloves to further dry them out.

“That’s what they tell the eggs,” Willis Eddy said from within the plane.

Lewis shook his head with the expression of a man with insects on his face. “I clocked him. I got these little marks on my knuckles from his teeth. I hope he gums Farina the rest of his life.”

They were thirteenth off the runway, climbing into the lightening sky behind the banking silhouettes of the 17’s just ahead of them, and they rose east to the assembly points toward the brighter air. The contrails of the highest aircraft stood out in dark relief.

They flew to Kassel without the usual talk, the periodic oxygen checks the only communication. Most of the way, they had an escort of P-47’s with their reassuringly fat milk bottle fuselages, and the leading and trailing elements of the formation far from them attracted the German interceptors once the escorts had sheered off for lack of fuel.

Piacenti called fighters coming up from nine o’clock low and Bryant swung the turret around to catch a glimpse of four Messerschmitts with bright yellow noses pulling up close to one another and breaking formation at Paper Doll ’s altitude, at the break curling back like the petals of a flower. They swooped out of range after some of the lower squadrons and stragglers.

He spun the turret to follow the action above and ahead and his vision shimmered, as though he had slugged a beer too quickly on a hot day. The diaphragm of his mask felt dank and cold. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and he could hear Eddy’s voice calling for steady but it wavered in volume. With concentration and detachment he seemed to understand what might have been happening, remembered a briefing: the A8B masks are prone to ice buildup in the exhalation bags, which unchecked leads to ice in the tube between the bag and diaphragm. He noticed below the fires of downed aircraft and bomb bursts as red peculiar blossoms, and moved to get a grip on his mask but felt like someone chest-deep in muck. Before his eyes colored electric bulbs blinked as sapphire, emerald, and ruby, and he felt his mind becoming luminous with dream; felt, like a drowsy child, ready to accept what needed accepting. He saw his drunk grandmother wandering around in his backyard dazed, impossibly holding a fifty-caliber Browning. With a sturdy and optimistic lack of resistance he slumped from the slung bicycle seat and tore the leg of his suit falling from the turret. He was dimly aware of the iron-cold slipstream blast on his calf. He remembered the creamy blandness of his mother’s egg salad, and was surprised to find his leg so tender, so sensitive.

He awoke to find Eddy and Bean working over him, transferring the portable oxygen bottles onto his mask, and he realized he was breathing through someone else’s as they did it. They were on their way home, Bean shouted to him. He nodded and waved. He had urinated in his suit and his thighs and rear were cold. The fuselage floor seemed to have the mealiness of wet sand, though he registered that was impossible.

He rode a long while with a kind of animal speechlessness. His mask again iced up and for a stretch Bean sat beside him and worked the only functioning mask on the buddy system, the two of them slumped together in their heavy flight suits as dull as drugged birds. He remembered frostbite and made an effort to move his fingers and toes. He had the weird sense the plane was no longer moving. He tried to keep awake but could not, and curled his toes within his boots as a last measure before passing out.

He was shuttled immediately to the station sick quarters and surrounded by frostbite cases. The sick quarters were four Nissen huts joined by enclosed hallways, discreetly removed by an aspen grove and a hillock from the barracks. He slept for sixteen hours and then sat up and gazed around him. The frostbite cases sat quietly, holding their affected areas like delicate and broken instruments. Their hands and feet changed as they watched absorbedly with apprehension edging on horror, from white and numb to red and swollen to something verging on black. A navigator a few bunks over lay as if dead with his head bandaged completely from the nose up. He’d been there three days and the men called him Claude Rains. Flak had blown out the perspex nose and his goggles had been smashed, Bryant’s neighbor told him. “The Doc said his eyes were frozen. Imagine?” The navigator was inert. A boy near the door was shaking uncontrollably. He had a blond cowlick that stuttered and waved like a signaling device.