Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

“Fuel shut off,” Bryant said to remind them. “Fire extinguisher valve.”

“Both,” Gabriel said. “We appreciate the thought.”

He clambered down to his panel behind them to work with Cooper transferring the fuel from the tank of the dead engine, and scrambled back into the sling once Cooper had confirmed his readings.

He settled himself in and swiveled the guns and everything went white and the plane tipped and there was a whooshing vacuum of air and he felt as though he’d been hit across the ribs and arm with a metal pole. In another part of the ship there was a scooping, thunderous sound, and he felt the whole aircraft slide across to the right. He gazed at his right arm and hand and was vaguely aware of Gabriel trying to get through to him, and he could see nothing but the discreet mouth of a tear along the forearm of his jacket, but the pain beneath it fascinated him, immobilized him. He thought of acid poured along his arm, searing invisibly in a chemistry accident. There was a strange unreality to all of this, not having been touched despite all those close calls and then this violation out of nowhere, like the villain in a movie reaching into the seats to knock his teeth out.

He felt a tug on his leg and looked down to see Cooper, the worry evident in his eyes over the oxygen mask. Bryant smiled reassuringly, though Cooper couldn’t see, and made a thumbs-up sign. It must have had the desired effect, because after a wary pause Cooper patted his knee and left. He focused on the interphone and said, “No problem.”

Static popped when Cooper, back in the cockpit, plugged his interphone back in. “The turret all right?” he said. “It don’t look like it.”

He looked around himself, woozy and relaxed. The charging slides were smashed, as if someone had taken the edge of a shovel to them. The feed chutes were severed. Oil was jetting up delicately from somewhere and spattering like soft rain on the sheepskin of his collar. He had the unpleasant sense that his forearm was open, cold air on bone. His glove was sodden with blood and when he squeezed, it bubbled over his wrist. He thought, Will this be like the oxygen? and was drunkenly proud of his courage in the face of his wound, and then said What? at Gabriel’s shouts of bandits, bandits coming down from above.

“My guns’re through,” he said, as if wanting to get that clear.

“Goddamnit, track ’em!” Gabriel screamed. “They think we’re dead meat.” Hits banged along the side of the fuselage, a horse cantering on sheet metal. He understood, and swiveled the turret. A Focke Wulf was arching by and he tracked it across their beam, and then let it go, and picked up a looping Messerschmitt. Another went by overhead and he followed it easily. “Lots of kills,” he said. “I got lots of kills.”

“At least they’re less ballsy now,” he heard Cooper mutter. He tracked another, the outline shifting and slipping out of the cracked gunsight. He was scaring Germans, pretending to shoot, playing at war in the middle of war. Then the oil got worse and glazed his goggles, and he climbed tenderly out of his sling, nauseated from the smell and taste within his mask.

He recognized Hirsch in front of him on the walk-around bottle, his eyes peering at Bryant as if looking for something. Hirsch was making lowering motions with both hands, gesturing Bryant to the fuselage floor beside the turret base. Light-headed, Bryant complied. His arm was raised and cold and Hirsch was picking at it with a jackknife. The jackknife seemed incongruous. Cooper appeared beside him and took over with the knife and hacked expertly up his sleeve, the sheepskin parting yellow and thick like whale blubber. Hirsch unzipped the first aid kit and held the sulfanilamide powder up for Bryant to see. He saw his arm exposed for the first time. The skin was whitish and sheared back and blood matted blackly around it, bright red here and there. Hirsch started sprinkling the powder, and Bryant watched as it crenelated the edge of the wound. They wrapped the arm in a temporary bandage, which felt cool and clean and kind. There was some hammering and Bryant was annoyed at the noise. Hirsch disappeared. Cooper nodded sternly and thumped his good shoulder and left as well. The plane rocked and stumbled.

His head cleared a little. He pushed the interphone button.

“Thanks, everybody,” he said, stupidly. “I’m okay.”

“If you’re okay get back up in the fucking turret,” Gabriel said. He sounded absolutely harassed. “Cooper says it’s just your arm.”

He struggled to his feet. “I’m up, Skipper, aye aye,” he said.

The plane hit a wall and he catapulted into and off the panel before him, ending up on his side. They were diving. The floor rose up past him. There was a cannonade of frigid air, and things flew past him toward the bomb bay. He covered his head with his hands. He crawled around on his knees to the flight engineer’s panel, and then they pulled out of the dive and he fell back onto the floor.

The interphone was skewed on his head and when he righted it, it was filled with panicked shouts and babble.

“Get me out of here! Get me out! ” Snowberry was shrieking. Lewis was demanding to know what was happening. Gabriel was shouting Bryant’s name. Bryant acknowledged. The airstream through his position was strong enough to lean against.

“Goddamnit! Get down to the nose!” Gabriel shouted. “Somebody get down to the nose!”

The plane was more or less level. Bryant hooked into the portable oxygen bottle and heard Gabriel tell Snowberry to keep his goddamn shirt on, for Chrissakes, nobody was going anywhere, before he unplugged the interphone and climbed cautiously down through the companionway.

It was much too bright. Just below Gabriel and Cooper’s seat level there was nothing but space. The nose opened outward into air like a wide-mouthed chute, flapping wires and cables. The legs of Hirsch’s seat remained in a grotesquely twisted bulkhead. His gun mount flapped backward. There was nothing in front of Bryant.

Hirsch’s interphone outlet hung loose above his head. He plugged in. It sparked and crackled.

“They’re gone,” he said.

“What do you mean, they’re gone?” Gabriel said. “Where’d they go?”

“They’re gone,” Bryant repeated.

“Jesus Christ, did they bail out? What?” Gabriel asked.

“The whole nose is gone,” Bryant said.

Snowberry said, “Oh, no.” Lewis cursed.

“Do you think they got out?” Gabriel demanded. “Is there any blood?”

Bryant looked. It was impossible to tell. His hands and feet were freezing. “I don’t see any blood,” he said.

“Their chutes?” Cooper tried. A fighter flashed by, bizarrely close without the mediating Plexiglas. “Are their chutes gone?” Bryant’s eyes were tearing even behind the goggles. Lewis and Snowberry were firing and Gabriel was jerking the plane all over the sky.

“I’m coming down,” Gabriel said. “Take over, Cooper.”

Bryant waited for him, suffering with the cold and edging out of the companionway both for his own protection and so that his pilot might get a look. Near his foot was a shattered rack for holding Hirsch’s pencils. Gabriel crawled down and mimed something Bryant couldn’t understand. He stared dumbly at his pilot until Gabriel in exasperation poked into the companionway. When he returned, he gestured that everything in front was gone. Bryant gestured that he knew that. Snowberry’s guns were still going. Cooper was shouting over the interphone, “Get back up here, you guys, no one called time out here.”

The fuselage behind them rocked and twanged like a banjo, yawing to the left. Snowberry shrieked, the sound blizzarding into static on the interphone, and didn’t stop. Get it away! it sounded like, Get it away!