Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

Bryant resisted the notion that Snowberry had reached a level of awareness that he had not. “I don’t see it that way,” he said stubbornly. “I don’t think we did so bad at Kassel.”

“Oh, yeah. Well. You didn’t even make it that far. Kayoed by the oxygen mask.”

“Don’t be a little asshole,” Bryant said. The “little” was a measure of how wounded he had been by Snowberry’s crack about the mask. “What good does it do to talk like that?”

“Look at this hand,” Snowberry said. Bryant couldn’t see it in the dark. “Christ.”

“Oh, God, let it be a milk run,” Snowberry added, minutes later, in a small voice. “Oh, let it be a milk run.”

He lay on his back and thought of his father.

It still seemed impossibly early. Somebody in the latrine was scrounging magazines from the trash drums. Lewis was where they had left him. Ball was asleep. Piacenti was playing solitaire, possibly; the cards were in unsteady rows beside him on the bed and Bryant could hear the faintest tapping as he laid one upon the other. Bryant had asked, on one of those interminable hunting trips when the plodding or the sun or the rain had finally angered him into courage, why he could never carry the gun, even when his father was obviously tired.

You can’t carry the gun, his father had answered. You’re a danger to yourself with a pointed stick.

The day he was to leave for the induction center, his mother had wrapped some pears and an apple together in a waxed-paper bundle for the train, and had urged him to say goodbye again to his father, waiting on the porch. His uncle Tom’s final words to him had been an admonition not to forget the following advice for getting by in the service: If you can move it, pick it up. If you can’t, paint it. If it moves by itself, salute it. Jeez, Bryant had thought. Here I am going away to something like this and that’s the best he can do? His father had been facing away from the house, gazing out over the clotheslines crowded with wash below.

“I should go if I’m going to be there by two-thirty,” Bryant had said, thinking, Turn around. Tell me I’m doing the right thing. Tell me you’re proud of all this. An inverted bright red shirt on the line waved, bye bye, bye bye.

“I’ve tried with you, Robert,” his father had said. “Your mother and I have tried. We hope you’re doing the right thing.”

He remembered lying on a cot in Florida with all those mosquitoes, thinking, You son of a bitch. If I ever get famous I’m gonna claim to be an orphan. He groaned aloud.

“Easy, trooper,” Lewis said from the opposite bunk. “Save your energy.”

He hadn’t been good enough for his father. He hadn’t been good enough to fly. He hadn’t been good enough to make bombardier, or navigator. He was an aerial gunner, and a flight engineer, and no one thought he could hit a barn at six feet and Tuliese didn’t trust him near the engines. He tried to calm himself with images of his own competence and grew frustrated. He tried to see himself again pouring fire into the hapless Messerschmitt they’d shot down, and saw instead the elusive lines of the others flashing through the formations, defeating easily the fastest manipulations of the turrets. He saw the cart-wheeling Lemon Drop , with that poor schmoe’s foot, and the Fortress from the Hamburg mission sailing into the hill. He lay under the sheets covered with sweat and dreaded the moment Lewis would notice his terror.

After a while he sat up. His feet hurt. His head pounded. The hut was darker and the sweat smell was stifling. Nearly everyone was awake. He could tell by the breathing. A little army of insomniacs, all listening, waiting, paying close attention to the night. He got off his bunk and started to walk and a voice said, “Watch the glasses, bub.” He headed for an upright shape on Lewis’s bunk. It turned out to be Snowberry.

Lewis was lying as he had been hours ago, hands behind his head. It seemed to Bryant a feat of some sort.

Snowberry whispered, “Somebody can’t sleep,” and Lewis grunted. Bryant slowly crouched beside the bed. They were quiet, and he felt like an intruder.

He became aware of another sound, a quiet and asthmatic sort of sniffing. Snowberry’s head was turned from both of them and he was crying.

Lewis wasn’t saying anything. Bryant was at a complete loss. He grimaced when he felt his own mouth trembling. Snowberry stopped for stretches, and swallowed, or made little tsking sounds with his tongue on his teeth. He did not rub his eyes or nose. Lewis seemed to be helping, though he didn’t move.

When Bryant’s knees hurt enough, he stood. Snowberry was still turned away. He crossed quietly to his bunk and climbed back into it, pulling the sheet up to his chin, remembering his grandmother in the doorway. He did not look back over at Snowberry and Lewis. He stared at the ceiling of the hut, which rippled in the darkness. He thought, tomorrow is just another mission , and, you need to sleep , and he closed his eyes to the ripples and to calm himself thought of Audie sitting blind and imperturbable in the Plexiglas nose while Ciervanski took her picture.

Someone hit the lights and he came out of what seemed a daze thinking something was wrong. He squinted and opened his eyes to slits and his watch said 1:15 a.m. All around him men were groaning and cursing. Snowberry was sitting upright already, blinking painfully. Lewis said, “Oh my God,” at the extent of his fatigue and the inhumanity of the hour.

With a refined touch of cruelty the orderly on wake-up duty read the bomb group’s timetable instead of repeating up-and-at-’em exhortations: breakfast, 0200; briefing, 0300; stations, 0515; alert, 0530; taxi, 0540; takeoff, 0550. “0550, gentlemen,” he repeated. “Let’s go.” He wasn’t going. He would be filling out forms and loafing around the day room for the next twelve hours while they did God knew what. Men swung without looking when he shook their covers, and near the door a gunner stood and shoved him with such force he cleared a bed and landed on his back. He lay stunned and winded with his arms and legs in the air like a baby’s. His breath returned with the sounds a long-distance runner makes.

“ Hey, ” he said, scrambling to his feet, alert for a general uprising. “Hey.” He was used to verbal abuse, and his voice registered his acute sense of the unfairness of physical abuse. He negotiated his way to the door and turned, a hand on the frame. “Stay in bed. See if I care. I hope they break all of you.” He turned off the lights and left, affecting triumph, but everyone was up.

They dressed. Bryant had saved for this mission a fresh pair of long underwear. The idea was to have something to absorb the pre-takeoff sweat before reaching altitude and the paralyzing cold. The hope was that the wait before takeoff would be short, to minimize the soaking the underwear had to absorb.

Bean was powdering his feet. Bryant borrowed some of the powder without asking. He pulled on his beat-up GI shoes. That was the prevailing wisdom: in case of hard luck, something comfortable enough to walk miles in, and dirty enough not to arouse suspicion.

Bean and Lewis, Snowberry and Ball were all without discussion putting on their best Class A uniforms — olive drab, pressed and folded wool — beneath their flying suits. Ball carefully straightened a leg and his pants fell as if new, creaseless, to the shoetops. Bean was straightening his cuffs with a special slow care. Even Lewis was working on his tie, struggling slightly with the knot: none of them held any hope that this would be a normal mission, and they were not going to be killed or captured in the worn General Issue they usually wore.

At breakfast the coffee kept coming, and was served in thick white mugs that were pleasing to handle and drink from. Every cook in the squadron was on duty, and they were asking the men in line how each wanted his eggs done. There was ham and corned beef hash and bread and a little butter. They sat before their trays staring at the excess in wonder and fear. The place was packed with crews, including guys they recognized who had to have arrived within the last week, some of whom looked younger than Snowberry. Bryant thought: Suppose we’re in formation next to some of these guys?