Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

The fighters ahead seemed to have misjudged the necessary altitude and were hurrying down to them, having wasted precious fuel. There were limitless fighters, Bryant imagined. They were all going to go down, one by one. The question was really the order. They weren’t going to get back. What he wanted at this point was to reach the target.

They came through in waves, steady lines, and in the chaos Bryant and Snowberry and Eddy and Hirsch and Piacenti and Ball and Bean and Lewis lectured and jabbered, shrieked and called out fighters, and hit almost nothing. Something nearby exploded with splintered pieces slashing outward, end over end. A Messerschmitt of a startling green appeared following a palisade of tracers to Bryant’s left. A Focke Wulf came in from abeam and stalled, and falling away raked their belly, and he could feel the hits banging into them. “Son of a bitch!” Snowberry was screaming. “He was right there! Son of a bitch! ” And they were gone.

“Comin’ around,” Piacenti called. Someone whimpered.

“They came a long way,” Lewis observed. “I don’t think they got too much juice left.”

They came on loose, every man for himself, maybe without the fuel to form up, some from the side and even the rear, and Lewis finally had something to shoot at. A Messerschmitt side-slipped by upside down, shooting at Archangel , and above them in a higher squadron Bryant saw an engine torn off and tumbling backward, the Fortress wing folding and shearing away. While he was watching, something else — a Messerschmitt? — collided head on with another Fortress, half rolling into its nose and shattering pieces outward before both planes exploded and the belly turret and its mount fell away free like a small barbell or a baby’s rattle.

He slewed his turret around and a Messerschmitt was on him in a quartering turn, the nose flashing, and the yellow dazzles of 20mm bursts walked toward his turret, one two three four five, banging the ship, and stopped, and the cowling and wingtip flashed by.

“Bryant!” Gabriel called.

“Bryant’s hit!” Ball said. “I saw the guy go past.”

“I’m okay,” Bryant was able to say. He felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Frankfurt! Frankfurt!” Hirsch was clicking the call button on the interphone in his excitement and it sounded like chattering teeth. To their left the sun showed silver and wide on two huge rivers, the Rhine and the Main. The whole formation was turning north and east toward the Initial Point.

The fighters were gone. Hirsch called in a time check. It had been more or less thirty minutes since Eupen. Bryant found that impossible to believe. Snowberry said, “You shoulda kept a better watch. You shoulda given that one to Stormy.”

Behind them Lewis was counting chutes. Bryant said, “The top squadron in the lead high group is gone, near as I can tell. Completely.”

“The 525th,” Gabriel said.

Quarterback had drifted out of sight, straggling back beyond the rear group. In that direction they could see on the curve of the earth a series of small fires generating spiraled pillars of black and gray smoke. The sky between the pillars seemed filled with confetti and litter, the hundreds of white American and occasional pale yellow Luftwaffe parachutes mingling and floating down like a chaotic airborne invasion. A Fortress miles away caught fire and fell from its vee, a quiet bundle in the sky.

“They’re pruning,” Snowberry said, and his words affected them all. “They’re pruning the 8th Air Force.”

Bryant remembered himself and checked the functioning of the four engines on his flight engineer’s panel, checking as well the fuel transfer, in case Cooper and Gabriel had forgotten. His rear end hurt and he was glad to be out of the sling seat. Hirsch announced they were passing over the IP and after a beat Lewis asked what it was.

“Dink town,” Hirsch said. “Gemünden, it’s called.”

“Just wanted to know,” Lewis said. He sounded miserable.

Bryant debated whether or not to get back into his turret and decided against it, in case there was trouble with or damage to the bomb bay doors. He’d hooked into a walk-around oxygen bottle and the rubber of his mask was cool and sloppy with sweat. He plugged in his interphone at the flight engineer’s panel.

“Now hit the target, you son of a bitch,” he heard Gabriel say to Eddy.

It felt as if they were accelerating, though he knew that wasn’t the case, and he imagined the flat and featureless landscape preceding Schweinfurt that he remembered from the briefing, imagined the flak batteries minutes away with infallible Nazis loading up and calibrating their elevations.

“What do we do if they’re using smoke?” Gabriel asked, more or less talking to himself.

The interphone crackled, and they could hear Eddy hesitate. He said, “They told us that if the lead couldn’t see the aiming point, we’d go for the housing and try for some skilled workers. We’re gonna hit something, I’ll tell you that.”

You better believe it, Bryant thought. The notion of bombed civilians at this point did not concern him. People down there were being blown up. People up here were being blown up. Everyone down there had something to do with the attempt on his life. He felt the sway and lift of short-term changes in direction, and knew the combat boxes were breaking up into their small component groups for the bomb run. The bombardiers of all following planes, Eddy included, would release on signal from the lead.

He could hear a distant thrumming and some faint booms. “Flak,” Hirsch called in. “Looks like one seven triple zero. Which is our altitude. If anyone’s wondering.”

The ship jerked upward and Bryant banged his head. There was another shock and the musical sound of fragments splaying over the plane’s metal skin. He was happy to be inside and closed in, happy to be unable to see the sky.

There was a huge boom and the plane bucked and reared upward and then mashed back to level flight.

“Guess they don’t want us at their steel balls,” Eddy murmured over the interphone. Bryant could hear his concentration.

“Everything’s fine,” Gabriel said. “Snowberry, did you see that burst?”

“It was purple and red in the center,” Snowberry said. “I don’t know how it missed me.”

Gabriel was skidding the plane a few degrees every so often as a last attempt at evasive action before turning the plane over to Eddy. Bryant felt the torque and gravity shift in his feet on the metal floor. Eddy called in the takeover, and flew them on the Automatic Flight Control, making careful and minute adjustments. Bryant imagined him hunched over the Norden bombsight the way Robin hunched over her drawings, her lips bunching and pursing, her eyes shifting in concentration.

The rate of climb indicator on the far right of his panel began to flutter. He called in the information to Gabriel.

“Stay off the interphone,” Gabriel said. “We’re fine.”

There was a creak and a growing roar and he felt from his position at the panel the circular buffeting of the changing air pressure. Back through the companionway the center of the plane was filling with light, glared highlights curving around the black cylinders of the five-hundred-pound bombs. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and the noise from the blast of air was an environmental force that surrounded the particular and thin noises from his interphone. He looked down through the companionway and out into space and saw a golden and green landscape with low drifting white smoke crossing to the southeast, the beginnings of the defensive screen the town was pinning its hopes on. The sky below was pocked and dirtied with smallish flak bursts. There was glare beyond his vision and shrapnel tinkled on the open doors.