Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Morale dropped as the story circulated. Snowberry at one point mused in Bryant’s presence, “Ever notice how morale here keeps going down without ever going up?” Someone posted in the ready room a list headed with the title What Won’t Work , and filled with items all the way from “ Honey, You Know You’re the Only One for Me ” to Prayer. Saluting was becoming more overtly a way of saying Fuck You to those who demanded it; the practice had often been considered “chickenshit” by the men in the first place, generally ignored except for the CO, the visiting brass, and formal occasions.

It was no longer uncommon, after missions, to find Norden bombsights, so obsessively protected in training in the States as the secret weapon the Axis would give Italy for, lying in the grass unattended near the hardstands like mysterious, useless gizmos cleared from the attic. Men were becoming geniuses at hoarding small slights. Unpleasant jobs and missions mornings produced a variety of obscure ailments, which debilitated no one and enriched everyone’s rotten humor. Everyone had a different method of following what was perceived to be an emerging pattern of sinister design, based on irrefutable omens. Half of three squadrons developed diarrhea.

Bryant didn’t and Snowberry did. They sat together watching Tuliese, who had quite a talent with the brush, paint the nose illustration onto Paper Doll. Now that he’d finally gotten around to it, there was little enthusiasm among the crew for ornamenting their B-17. Snowberry clutched his knees to his stomach and rocked every so often, glancing at the latrines regularly to assure himself they were there and that he could make it. Tuliese leaned close, giving special attention to the thighs. He was known as a master of shading.

The paper doll in question was a naked redhead vaguely modeled on Lana Turner. When he’d been informed that Lana Turner was not a redhead, Tuliese had answered menacingly, So what? Everyone had shrugged. She was being clothed with a filmy slip of what was supposed to be a nightgown inadequately covering her private parts. There was an unofficial contest between crews to be the most daring with their nose art, occasionally interrupted by halfhearted clean-up attempts when the brass considered things to be getting out of hand. Bryant thought of some of the flak-smashed noses he’d seen and considered how many hours of loving work were being erased in instants.

Lewis meanwhile was becoming obsessed with speed. His latest idea was the stripping of the camouflage from the B-17’s. With the paint gone there would be reduced weight and smoother surfaces, translating into fleeter Fortresses. “I mean, who are we kidding with camouflage?” he said. “They can’t see us?”

“You want to fly in a silver plane in the middle of one of those formations?” Bryant asked. “What about just carrying a sign in German that says, ‘8th Air Force Commanding Officer’?”

“Not just us ,” Lewis said, with the tone of someone teaching the hopelessly limited. “Suppose they were all silver. All the planes.”

Bryant had no answer. “They’d reflect the sun,” he said. “We’d blind each other.”

Lewis thumped his cheek with his middle finger and surveyed Bryant a good long time. He said, “Sometimes you make it too easy for me.”

And Snowberry, trying not to laugh, imagining no doubt the tremor through his bowels, said, “I think Lewis means he doesn’t see the drawback.”

Bean received word that his best friend had been killed in the Pacific theater, and he was inconsolable. He did not eat and could barely speak and so worried Bryant that he decided to follow Bean around for a little while and keep an eye on him. All he was able to get out of Bean was that his friend had been involved in the bombing of New Georgia Island and had been trapped in a burning Dauntless. He sat around the day room feeling useless while Bean stared blankly at a Liberty Magazine. He had tried mentioning food, and Billy Conn, and home. Bean gazed at the table and touched an ashtray with his finger.

Snowberry slumped in a chair by the folding magazine rack. He’d been throwing up for two days now and he looked drawn. He had his sketchpad propped at an angle that allowed Bryant a look. The pad was blank. Every so often Bean shivered and rubbed his arm.

“How do you know he burned to death?” Bryant asked in a low voice.

Bean didn’t seem to hear. He fingered an old snapshot of his friend that now held a deep bronze tarnish, and let it drop. He said, “He was my best friend. What’re you guys?”

Bryant said, “Look, Bean, I’m going to write a letter, okay?” He pulled out paper and a pencil to underline his intention. Instead of oversolicitousness he intended to try something in the way of Life Goes On.

Bean simply sat, as still as a vacant house.

“I think Bean’s stepped off the curb,” Snowberry said. “If you want to know what I think.”

Bryant wrote the date on his paper and Dear Lois , and a series of lazy, slanted lines.

Beside him Snowberry noisily began to work and with quick listless strokes sketched a four-engined plane: a fat childish cross. After a moment he added a squiggle of smoke curling upward from the tail. He drew flames as fat parallel fingers and Bryant said, “Gordon,” as a warning. Without looking up, Snowberry changed the flames to bullets spraying out of a turret.

Bryant wrote, I guess these sorts of letters are supposed to go the other way , and stopped, and then tried, I’m writing because I got myself into a mess that you should know about , and stopped again, and finally wrote, How are you ? and decided on that as an opening.

How had he gotten himself into this? What did he want? Lois, and his high school, his town, his friends, all seemed like a half-remembered birthday party. Lois had a right to know what was going on, he told himself, and he felt a loyalty to her that was sincere and nostalgic. But he considered: Could he have written to his prewar self and communicated anything? He thought of Snowberry’s fishing trips from the journal, and blackfish rocking gently in the sand with staring eyes and mouths opening and closing as if speech were prevented by this alien medium of air.

Before, he had vaguely hoped for a Dear John letter from her, and had thought melodramatically that he deserved it. Now he was beginning to understand that his country, for whatever its reasons, had informed him that he and his friends were in the most serious way on their own.

He became aware that Snowberry was holding his pencil motionless an inch from the pad, and was staring at it. The pencil point was trembling.

Bryant crossed out How are you? and started again.

August 14, 1943

Dear Lois ,

Things here have not been going well. We have been pushed very hard and have seen many things and the rumors are something big and terrible is coming up.

I have always wanted to be honest with you so I write this letter. I have been dating another woman here, an Englishwoman, and I don’t know how serious it is.

I didn’t know whether to tell you or not but as you can see I decided to.

He folded the paper. A dispatch from the front, he thought. If and when things ever cooled down, and he were still alive, he would use it. Word was going around about a colonel in the 379th who had told his crews that the key to fighting the kind of war they were fighting was to make believe you were dead already, and then the rest came easy. Hirsch in line for chow had fiddled with calculating on his slide rule the odds on their completing their tour alive based on the squadron’s current 6.4 percent loss rate and after some angry refiguring had thrown the slide rule away. Bean had left the line to retrieve it, handling it gingerly and reading the cramped lines and numbers as though it might have made a mistake and could be coaxed out of it.