Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

The sky had cleared a good deal. They were perhaps waiting now for the more western bases to clear. No one mentioned the Regensburg force, and there were no official announcements on the subject. Most of their gear was strewn around them. A jeep arrived, and an officer climbed out and conferred off to the side with Gabriel. When they parted Gabriel, with a look of regret, waved them into the plane, and they stood and wrenched on their outer layers while the jeep tooled off. They climbed in in small groups, officers near the nose, gunners and radio operator through the waist. Bryant was the last aboard.

He sat on his sling and swayed like the boy on Snowberry’s swing. The air was cooler. His neck prickled. The turret retained its factory smell of gasoline and leather and steel. It was too recently off the assembly line to have lost it, he understood, and it struck him how little time had been involved in all of this — sign up, show up, train, arrive in England, end up here, doing this. He shook himself, frightened all over again. While the first B-17’s of the flight line ran up their engines, turning over the huge Wright Cyclones with a roar, he ran through his training manual’s profile of the perfect gunner, reciting silently from memory: the perfect aerial gunner, when he was six, his father gave him a.22 and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, he was ranging the hills and woods near his home potting squirrels until the pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, he got his first shotgun and went quail hunting, duck hunting, grouse hunting, and learned the principle of leading a moving target. He learned instinctively that you do not fire at a moving target, since it will no longer be where it was, but ahead of it, and learned too that his gun is a deadly weapon, to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Corps, he has a whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of the new weapon, and the principles of shooting down the enemy airplanes are exactly the same as those of shooting a duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner.

He closed his eyes. His throat seemed constricted and he wondered if he was getting the mumps. He visualized Messerschmitts as tow targets, Focke Wulfs as fragile and static ducks.

A bird stood on the canopy of the dorsal gunner in No Way , to his right, feathering wingtip feathers slightly in the gathering slipstream from the plane’s engines. Bryant thought, This must be the way it is before a stupid attack, when you know it’s going to fail and it can’t help but fail but you can’t change it or run away; you can only be a part of it, and help it to fail.

Over on No Way the dorsal gunner was rotating his turret and elevating his guns to dislodge the bird, which turned slowly and imperturbably with the rotating canopy, the black fifty-caliber barrels flanking it in a paradox of power and impotence.

No Way went off ahead of them, the huge tail swinging around like a monstrous and slow weathervane. Bryant could see on the small blurred face of the tail gunner his irritation at the danger and probable stupidity of all this. He swiveled his guns at Paper Doll angrily, like the butt of a joke, a man in a tiny car fitted with towering and foolish fins.

Bryant watched them go off tail-heavy and wallowing, only slowly achieving any sort of grace, and then looked on blankly as his own ship began the rush forward. The end of the paved strip was happily vague in the fog but he could feel when they had been on earth too long, and started counting, and it seemed far too late when he felt the bump and lift and sway of Paper Doll finally letting go and straining upward. The wings tilted and wobbled under the weight and the trees marking the end of the base appeared and rolled by beneath, and that gave way to undifferentiated gray, and then they were climbing and banking to the right, although he couldn’t be sure. No one spoke. All four engines sounded good. He watched for lights, for the black shapes of other Forts, though by then it would be too late. The engines’ pitch seemed changed and enclosed, a roar in a bathtub. The gray began to thin and strand and suddenly they were out and into a brilliant blue, the sun flooding across his canopy and the ship’s upper surfaces, and all around him was the awesome boys’ war spectacle of the entire group’s B-17’s rising from the cloud blanket, like a horizon of magically appearing good guys, all sweeping into the clear and cold sunlight.

They were to form up as a squadron seven miles north of the field. The earliest planes to arrive began circling at an agreed-upon altitude and subsequent arrivals formed into their three-plane vees and slipped into place to join the slow wait. With the twelve-plane squadron finally assembled, they began climbing to the south to find the larger group. Hirsch announced they were eleven minutes late.

The larger group was not where it was supposed to be. Bryant circled his glass dome, scanning the blue and finding nothing. Gabriel asked Hirsch peevishly if they were where they were supposed to be, and Hirsch, though he wasn’t lead navigator, confirmed it testily. After the pre-takeoff wait the delay was particularly irritating.

They crisscrossed a good bit of England searching. With every change of direction there were groans over the interphone. Willis Eddy every so often asked Hirsch to identify various towns. Hirsch pointed out Peterborough and Oxford, and then stopped answering. A pond or lake below was a luminous light blue. Bryant imagined Robin seeing these colors, and missed her. Eddy speculated on the interphone as to the identities of subsequent villages until Gabriel told him to pickle it, and Cooper asked for some semblance of interphone discipline.

With the rest of their squadron they circled, scanning the horizon for the larger group.

“What’s a silage?” Willis Eddy asked. His voice in Bryant’s ear suggested a casual curiosity that made Bryant wish Eddy would lose consciousness until the bomb run. He lifted his earpiece away and cleaned an ear with his little finger, his glove under his arm, and resettled the earpiece.

“A what? ” Gabriel was saying.

“A silage,” Eddy said. The formation banked and they banked with it. The horizon lifted and swung and their starboard wing rose to the light. “S-I–L-A-G-E. Like on a farm.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gabriel said.

It’s where they keep the animals at night,” Lewis called in. “What’s going on up there?”

“I thought that was a barn,” Eddy murmured.

“Eddy, the next thing I hear out of you better have to do with the bomb run,” Gabriel said. “You keep interphone discipline like Gracie Allen.”

“Jeez Louise,” Eddy said. The interphone was silent.

No Way was not far off their port wingtip. Their dorsal gunner rotated slowly, as if satisfying himself the bird was gone. Bryant remembered the potato farms in Barrington he’d been taken to see, a Fourth of July he’d spent in Tiverton, hot and dusty and enjoying a sticky strawberry soda while a parade went by. Small parade by Providence standards, with dogs sprinting along the route barking at the bands. A barnstormer had been promised in a local field and had indeed shown up, but had spent all of Bryant’s visit tinkering with an engine that seemed disappointingly small and ill-kept. Mother of Jesus , the barnstormer kept saying in exasperation. Afterwards Bryant’s father had sardonically commented on the miracle of the airplane, although his uncle Tom had been more enthusiastic later when Bryant had reported on the trip. The barnstormer’s machine had resembled the biplane he’d seen disintegrate as a small child and he’d come away impressed with the flying machine as an amazingly complex assemblage of interdependent elements, all capable of failure. That any of them flew and returned their pilots to earth safely he found a notion to marvel at. He’d started studying engines not long after that. He hadn’t been very good—“Just watch, ” he remembered his father saying more than once, like Favale, like Tuliese — but he had been dogged.