Paper Doll

Part One. The Baby Train

They lay on the hardstand under the wing of Archangel, more or less uncertain as to what they were supposed to be doing. Their commanding officer had been a car salesman from Pocatello, Idaho, and there was no acute sense around the base, yet, that the aircrews’ ground time needed to be filled. The sun was warm and welcome on their legs. They’d just been playing with hoses and Lewis was letting his shirt dry on him. Bobby Bryant had spread his over a dismantled engine nacelle. Bean lay asleep on the grass with his head on a bag of doughnuts. His cheek and open mouth were turned to the bag, and the illusion was that of a swimmer taking a breath, or someone eating in a novel way.

They were new to all of this and fairly sure they had a good deal more to learn, but no one was going to ask for work. From what they could understand, the 8th Air Force was still in a disconcerting state of confusion.

Bobby Bryant was talking about back home, Providence, Rhode Island, and Lewis and Snowberry were lethargic enough to give him their attention, and Bean was asleep, so there was no one to interrupt him. He was encouraged.

His family had owned a series of dogs, all kept outside, all high-strung and aloof from Bobby — all his father’s dogs, his mother liked to say. He remembered at five or six sitting in the hot sun with one of them, Toby, a small squat mongrel with German Shepherd somewhere in its bloodlines. Somehow he had reached for it and Toby had nipped his fingers, forearm, and bicep in a frenzy of irritation, and then had almost immediately resumed a sort of placidity. He’d been terrified of the dog after that, and the dog, as if to torment him, had developed a way of covertly lifting a lip in a silent snarl when only Bobby was looking. He did not risk his father’s contempt by bringing it up.

They got the dogs through the mail — unflagging and omniscient hunting breeds promised from faraway kennels — and unfailingly the dogs arrived with some affliction — one eye ruined, a serious limp, odd lumps on the neck or chest — and a disposition soured by it.

They fell like Limeys at the Somme, his uncle who fancied military history liked to say. Toby was hit by a car. Corky tore off in full throat after a bird of some sort and plummeted, still baying, from a rocky outcropping. King died of an infection that made an eye swell up grotesquely. Someone poisoned Snapper, an animal of such epic nastiness that it had to be chained at all times. Neighborhood children, Bobby remembered, gathered at safe distances to watch it foam and tear with a chilling intensity at its chain and collar, in such awe of the animal’s fury that they did nothing to tantalize it further, only watching day after day in hushed silence, as one might watch a volcanic eruption.

Tippi, Bobby’s favorite, a smallish white and black animal with an inexplicably crushed ear, disappeared on one of his father’s hunting trips and was never heard from again. The notion haunted Bobby that perhaps the dog had been hurt and left to fend for itself, and was even now dragging itself around the same stretch of forest in eastern Connecticut, its eyes wide with hunger.

All the dogs had frightened his sister Amy terribly — Toby had even stalked her when they were alone, its head low in wolfish concentration — and she kept as a talisman against them a gingham stuffed animal resembling a pork chop that her mother had made for her. She called it Miss Ebboo, introduced it only to Bobby, and lived in fear her father would find it.

“Miss Ebboo,” Lewis said. It did not sound as if he was enjoying the story.

When he was a kid, Bryant went on, about seven, and the Depression had really hit, he remembered that it was clear to even the smallest kids in the neighborhood that there was something screwed up about the world the way they understood it and that a guy like his father or a neighbor could work hard and be good at something and still find out no one wanted him. He had told his sister then and there that he was going to be a pilot someday, flying around Texas and the ocean.

“Why don’t you give it a rest for a while,” Lewis said, and Bryant stopped talking. He closed his eyes to the sun and remembered St. Louis winning the World Series, cheating his Athletics. He remembered Capone going to jail, as if having just given up. He remembered his parents refusing to let him see Frankenstein, his mother herself in fact refusing to go, and his father taking it in one Saturday night alone without telling him, breaking his heart, and returning to pronounce it windy. He remembered his father leaning conspiratorially close and allowing, with a cruelty that still left Bryant breathless when he thought about it, that the monster was certain as ants something to see.

He remembered the world and his father shutting down possibility, and pilots — aero-men — as always the vivid exception. He resolved maybe then, thinking of the monster he still had not seen, the monster they wouldn’t put on the advertising posters, that he was going to fly. The possibility of washing out was too terrible to entertain.

They lay spread out with the other crews beneath the wings of B-17F Flying Fortresses. They had been discussing with intermittent interest the possibility of the Wing’s acquisition of impressive new B-17G Flying Fortresses. The interest in the G variant was not casual: it was supposed to feature a remote-controlled turret in the nose beneath the bombardier’s station, forming a kind of chin on the plane. The turret held two fifty-caliber Brownings and struck them all as an enormous improvement over the single pivot-mounted machine guns in the nose of their F. German interceptor tactics for confronting the massed Fortresses had evolved almost exclusively into head-on passes to take advantage of the relative futility of the F’s nose armament. And, as Lewis liked to remind them, the relative futility of the F’s gunners. The tactics had become very successful. They thought about the G’s with a healthy and selfish dislike for any other crews that might receive them first.

The first airplane Bryant had ever seen had crashed while he was watching. It had been an old yellow De Havilland biplane, looping and sideslipping over Narragansett Bay, perhaps for the entertainment of the bathers on the surrounding beaches. Bryant had been standing knee deep in a warmed and reedy part of an inlet. The water around his legs lapped and rippled quietly. The engine changed pitch and the biplane had trembled in mid-air, and while he watched, it folded at the center as if on delicate hinges, collapsing upon itself and twisting apologetically downward. Rowboats had labored out to the point of the splash.

Their crew chief, an unpleasantly beefy twenty-four-year-old named Tuliese, was standing on a rolling metal scaffold beside their plane, Paper Doll, a few hundred yards down the flight line. He was painting a small vertical yellow bomb six feet or so beneath the pilot’s side window. The bomb denoted a mission flown, and now there were two on the plane. Tuliese held the piece of sheet steel he used as a palette aloft to block the sun while he worked. The flashing dazzled Bryant.

Snowberry was practicing his Crosby, nestled comfortably against some folded tarps the line crews used to protect engines under repair. He introduced himself as Tech Three Gordon Snowberry, Jr., somewhat proud of being the lowest-ranking crew member in Paper Doll, and made just about everyone who met him wonder at exactly what age the Army Air Forces decided someone was too young for service in the Air Corps. He was blond and small and did not shave, and was convinced his voice had a mellow resonance uncannily matching Bing Crosby’s. He hoped to be a dentist when the war was over, and often pointed out while the men ate what Oh Henry!s and Baby Ruths could do to their molars. He liked to sketch, and had no aptitude for it. He enjoyed telling people about his past that he had just flat walked out of school and signed up to get in on this thing. He was a ball turret gunner, which was a job, Lewis liked to say, for small fanatics or pinheads, and he accepted with happy equanimity his position. He believed he was a good gunner. He had only been at it for two missions. A good friend of his with the unlikely name of Sneeb had been unlucky enough to be flying in the belly of a Fortress sustaining minor damage on the raid to Emden, flak shearing away a small piece of the rotating mechanism that allowed escape from the ball, and when the undercarriage had collapsed upon landing, the full weight of the sixty-five-thousand-pound Fortress had come down upon the ball turret, and Snowberry’s friend. Speaking of it later, he had only been able to cry, his breath coming in small whoops. Bryant had been embarrassed to be present, and not much help.

Snowberry had settled in now, hands in his pockets, testing various scat phrases. He’d diversified recently to duets, a fact of which he was secretly proud, and he began both parts of “An Apple for the Teacher”: “You’re sophis-ticated. I think I’m naive.” He softened his tone to affect the transition from Connie Boswell to Bing. Part of the key to Crosby was that certain insouciance.

Lewis opened an old forwarded newspaper he’d brought along to read in the sun and flapped it in Snowberry’s general direction. Snowberry lapsed into a more unobtrusive run: Buh buh buh bum, buh buh buh bum.

“Story here,” Lewis said, “about an Army Trainer that lost it and pancaked onto a funeral procession.” Bryant opened his eye a crack to see, but Lewis was folding the paper, the Dayton something.

“Pilot error,” Snowberry said.

“That One Check He Didn’t Make,” Bryant said.

“So the headline,” Lewis said, “is What Began As a Funeral Ended in Tragedy.”

They were quiet, thinking about it. “Can’t deny it,” Snowberry finally said.

“You know what I feel like?” Bean was awake. He hadn’t opened his eyes, though he looked considerably more dignified with his mouth closed. He was Paper Doll’s radio operator, and unpopular. He was fat around the face in a way that seemed childish, and was instantly recognizable as unathletic. He was already well known for his inability to touch wriggly things. Squadron if not base opinion was that he was insufficiently masculine.

“I feel like Mexican food,” he said.

Bean had once confided to Bryant and Lewis that he always kept thirty-five cents in mad money on his person, at all times.

“Mexican food,” Lewis said grimly.

“Lewis doesn’t like Mexican food,” Snowberry said.

Lewis bounced something small and light off Bean’s head. “You think they’d be swimming that river if the food on their side was good?” he asked.

Whatever Lewis had thrown, Audie had gotten to and was now eating. Audie was one of the base dogs, blind enough that they’d often hear around the base the small-scale collisions and yelps involving the dog and recently moved equipment. When there was major movement going on, the dog stayed in one spot, next to their Nissen hut. A jeep had knocked her sprawling once, and the sound of the engines and brakes had made a lasting impression.

Bean tried to pet her, and she pulled away. Bryant had toyed with the idea upon first seeing her that here, finally, was his own puppy, but she had proven too stubbornly independent for that, disappearing for long stretches even as she seemed to recognize and acknowledge their kindness.

Bryant wondered aloud, gazing at her, when the G variants might come through.

“When they’ve used up all the F’s,” Lewis suggested.

“That’s not very funny,” Bean said.

“Shut up,” Lewis said.

Bean apologized. He seemed to feel he was always saying something to irritate people and never knew why, and his method of handling it was to apologize frequently in general, hoping to suggest that he meant well.

Lewis stood and straddled a child’s bike he had bought in the village. Or claimed he had bought in the village. He began pedaling in wobbly circles, his knees high and wide on the undersized frame, the front wheel nosing erratically about as he attempted to gain speed. He leaned dramatically over and, picking up velocity, scooped up a deflated Mae West with one hand.

“Where is everybody?” he asked. “We’re supposed to be taking a picture here. Don’t tell me I hosed down for nothing.” He took a swipe with the Mae West at Bobby Bryant as he went by.

“They said they’d be here,” Bryant said.

“You got somewhere to go?” Snowberry asked. Lewis swept past, trying to hook the soft noose of the Mae West collar around his head. He whapped Snowberry in the face.

“Lewis is the kind of guy,” Snowberry said, “it said in the yearbook, ‘Enjoys a good practical joke,’ and what they meant was he likes to kick people’s teeth out.”

Lewis ran over his hand.

“You know, all you’re doing,” Snowberry said, “is making enemies of the very people on who your life may depend.”

“I don’t have enemies,” Lewis said. “Though some of my friends could stand watching.”

Snowberry said, “In my mind you’re riding in a hole that’s getting deeper and deeper.”

Audie could hear the motion and sniffed the air nervously. She stood and stretched and curled deeper behind Snowberry into the tarpaulins.

“What a stupid dog,” Lewis said, and swished the Mae West at her. Her ears curled back. “We get dog stories and blind dogs and every other thing. I’m sick of dogs.”

“I like dogs,” Bean said.

“What do you know?” Lewis asked. “I heard you once go ‘Somebody get the door’ during a Lionel Hampton solo.”

“Dogs for sale,” Snowberry crooned. “Appetizing young dogs for sale.”

Lewis stopped riding. The rest of the crew was waving them down to Paper Doll. Tuliese had finished the bomb and was rolling the scaffolding away.

Their pilot, a first lieutenant named Gabriel, had arranged a photo session to promote crew esprit de corps and give everyone something to send home. Lewis was on his second tour and third crew and rarely tired of comparing the present group unfavorably to any other group in the ETO. On the way back from their first mission together he had angrily suggested changing the plane’s name to Chinese Fire Drill, in honor of the overall coordination and performance of the ship’s gunners.

Gabriel had a chart on which he’d figured the positioning for the photo, and he read it aloud: Kenneth A. Gabriel, Jr., pilot, Ellis Cooper, co-pilot, Willis Eddy, bombardier, Samuel Hirsch, navigator, standing, back row; Sebastian Piacenti and Lambert Ball, waist gunners, Harold Bean, radio operator, Robert Bryant, flight engineer, Gordon Snowberry, Jr., ball turret, and Lewis Peeters, tail gunner, kneeling, front row. While Gabriel read, they snickered at each other’s names.

They lined up in that order and Bryant retrieved his shirt from the engine nacelle. Gabriel approved of their sloppiness in terms of the picture: it gave them that casual veterans’ look.

He had talked another pilot, a guy named Charley Rice who flew Boom Town, into taking the picture. It was one of Rice’s hobbies.

Rice had sauntered up while they were positioning themselves and had begun unfolding the camera tripod before them without comment.

“I figure you should frame it, Charley, so that you can see the name, too.” Gabriel pointed at the name behind him on the nose of the plane.

Rice did not answer. He was trying to affix the box camera onto the tripod. It was apparently an arduous task.

They were not used to all being together with nothing to do, officers and men, and they waited awkwardly. Lewis said, “Bean told someone — and I’m quoting now — that Snowberry here, to get into the ball, has to ‘curl into the fecal position.’”

“You’ve been reading my letters,” Bean said, shocked.

“In a what position?” Willis Eddy asked. His toe nosed Bean’s bag of doughnuts.

“He meant fetal,” Gabriel explained. He made a circular motion with his hand, as if to hurry Rice’s progress with the camera.

“I know that,” Willis Eddy said. “I thought it was funny.”

They waited and took special care with the kind of rumple they wanted to effect and calibrated their expressions and Rice still wasn’t ready. He fumbled with a latch and sweated. Something gave a wicked snap and he seemed to have hurt a finger.

“That the right camera?” Lewis asked politely. “Some of those buggers are tricky.”

From his kneeling position Bryant surveyed the row of profiles on both sides of him with some pride, imagining his father or mother or Lois seeing it. He imagined his mother saying, “That’s the plane they fly, behind them,” imagined his father grudgingly conceding that they looked like a pretty good bunch.

“Paper Do,” Rice said, squinting down into the viewfinder. “What’s that mean, you suppose?” Gabriel colored and moved the lines slightly to the right, to avoid blocking the painted name. Rice took four pictures and everyone put in orders.

“This one’s for Jean, from all of us,” Lewis said. They laughed. Jean was Snowberry’s first girlfriend, a Brit from a nearby village, and she had dated a number of men on the base. Snowberry was sensitive about it. Lewis without his knowledge often compared her ability to say no to that of a particularly placid and acquiescent Red Cross doughnut girl known to all of them simply as Red Myrtle.

“Lewis,” Snowberry said.

“She’s a fine girl,” Lewis said. “God knows.”

Piacenti had once asked Lewis at chow if he thought of Jean as that kind of girl. Lewis had said he thought of her as a farm animal.

As they were leaving, he said to Bryant, “I got a dog story for you. We had a dog, Skeezix, we were going to take him to be fixed, my dad and me. Bit the shit out of me while we were rounding him up. I didn’t punish him or anything, figured what the hell. The next day we picked him up and he looks at me with these wide eyes like ‘Jesus Christ, this is the last time I fuck with you! Bite the guy’s hand and he cuts your nuts off!’”

Bryant when he reflected on it later found the story haunting for the same reason Lewis found it funny: the notion of retribution out of all proportion.

He sat alone in the day room afterwards with some V-mail from Lois. As Nissen huts went, this one was larger and more dismal than most. He sat in a battered easy chair but the corrugated metal walls made the whole thing feel like a construction site. Higher up they were covered with pin-ups no one liked enough to steal, and the pictures were torn and dirty from constant pawing. There was a wooden table next to his easy chair with a lamp on it and a tray of ancient doughnuts. The undersides of the doughnuts were furred with mold.

The day room had been set up for the aircrews’ leisure, and was looked upon by everyone as the nearest thing to a last resort. Bryant spread the letter before him and concentrated on an image of Lois, his high school girlfriend. He saw her on his parents’ sofa, laughing at the radio. He reread the letter.

I guess it must seem strange to you sitting where you are reading this thinking about me and where I am. I’m on Fox near the water, where the railroad bridge goes over. It’s a beautiful day tho it’s been raining lots lately. The war seems very far away and very close at the same time. Everyone’s very excited and pulling and praying for you. Your uncle Tom says you’re probably an ace by now, and your father said he read about a guy who shot his foot off cleaning his guns. (Can you be an ace on a bomber?)

I’m glad you have a dog, because I think they’re good company. Even if you have to share them. It’s too bad that the dog can’t see. I guess you’re a Seeing-Eye person. Your father says he didn’t know you could have dogs. I didn’t tell him what you said about your friend taking a squirrel up in the plane with him because I don’t believe you and that’s that.

Lewis claimed that he had had a squirrel, Beezer, trained to eat out of his hands — the little son of a bitch would sit there like Arthur Treacher, he’d say — and that it had flown two lowlevel missions with him toward the end of his first tour. According to Lewis, at altitude the animal skittered all through the fuselage, its feet sounding like light hail on the aluminum. It showed up on the co-pilot’s shoulder and nearly scared him to death. A rat! he’d screamed over the interphone. Jesus Christ, we got rats! He’d been reassured by the pilot and an amused bombardier that it was no rat, judging by the tail, but he’d cursed throughout the flight to the target that he’d wet himself because of the goddamned thing and that it was probably eating through the control cables right then, while he was talking. Ever see the teeth on those bastards? he kept saying. They were all sitting there laughing, he insisted over the interphone, and pfffft—right through the cables, and into the drink the hard way. They’d bombed some marshaling yards in Holland and Beezer had never been seen again.

Beezer, Lewis liked to theorize, had done a flying one and a half out of the bomb bay. Some Nazi manning an antiaircraft battery got it right in the face. He would mimic the plummeting Beezer, arms outspread, snarling. He speculated on the aerodynamics of the tail. He said, You think anyone’s going to know what he did? We’re talking about unsung heroes here.

So what’s new?

There’a a young boy with the government that moved into the third floor of the Duffy’s (very mysterious) and everyone’s wondering what’s up. All the girls are wild about him. But you don’t have anything to worry about as you KNOW.

Everyone we talk to is thrilled when we say we have a boy in the service. The poor girls who don’t are so left out. People say that’s our part — find a boy, write him letters, maybe even get engaged. Mom says maybe they figure you’ll fight even harder and do a better job if you’ve got someone in mind you’re fighting for. How did I get on to that subject?

Bryant folded the letter and got up. He sighed, and went outside. Lewis was breaking plates over his head.

They made a curious and fragile wooden sound and separated easily into a rain of pieces, like clay pigeons. Snowberry was handing him plates from a tea service, and one by one he was breaking them over his head. Crockery pieces bounced and ticked off the pavement.

“Isn’t it great?” Snowberry said. Bean and Piacenti were standing behind Lewis. “Lewis found all this stuff in the village. He got it all for nearly nothing. Some woman had lost her sons and was selling like everything she owned just right out in front of her house. Flipped. The neighbors were trying to talk her out of it and everything.” He gestured at a small heap of plates and teapots, cups and platters. Lewis broke another and a piece ricocheted a startling distance. It struck Bryant again how young Snowberry was: the same age as Lois’s little brother. He had a fleeting image of Lois’s brother in a B-17, like a boy allowed to sit in the gunner’s seat at a country fair.

“What’s it all worth?” he asked.

“Who knows?” Snowberry said. “You think they give away good china for peanuts around here?”

“Old hell-for-leather Bryant,” Lewis said. “He’d like to be a better gunner, but he knows what the bullets cost.”

“Hey, I’m just asking,” Bryant said. “You guys would piss on your mom’s Sunday clothes.”

“With Mom still in them,” Lewis said. “She used to warn us about that.”

“They sure break good, though, don’t they?” Piacenti said. “Whatever they’re made of.”

“It’s a funny gag,” Bryant said.

“He did it to me, too,” Bean said. “I thought he was gonna crack my skull.”

“I am gonna crack your skull,” Lewis said.

Bean shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I never know when he’s kidding or not,” he complained. Bean seemed to want to believe that the natural order of things was harmony, that conflict came from misunderstanding. His father had run for selectman with the slogan BEAN: I’TS LIKE BEING ELECTED YOURSELF.

“You gotta watch out, Bean,” Piacenti said. “He’s out to get you.”

Bean nodded unhappily, half convinced.

Lewis did seem to have it in for Bean, and no one knew why. It was an instinctual thing, it appeared; pure schoolyard.

“I’m Bean’s personal bogie,” Lewis said. “His own bandit. In the cloud, out of the sun. Whenever he lets his guard down.”

“I should talk to Lieutenant Gabriel,” Bean said. “I don’t see how we’re supposed to work together.”

Lewis shouted and jumped on him. Bean shrieked and Lewis drove them both into the crockery pile. The others laughed and a cup skittered edgewise like a top across the hardstand. Lewis held a teacup to the crown of Bean’s head like a tiny dunce cap, and Bryant laughed, grateful to have been spared the humiliation.

“Leave him alone, Lewis,” he said. As they shifted, the crockery made musical sounds beneath their weight. “Aren’t we a little old for this?”

“Listen to George Arliss,” Lewis snorted. “A year out of high school under his belt. And Strawberry, not even old enough to have a fight.”

“I prefer other forms of contact, if that’s what you mean,” Snowberry said.

“I’m trying to toughen this crew up,” Lewis said. “I know I’m doing the right thing. Bean knows that, even if you don’t. Right?” He glared down at Bean.

“It’s pretty clear to me,” Bean said. Lewis got off him.

“You’re the oldest,” Bryant said. “You should set an example.”

“I am,” Lewis said. “I’m getting pretty tired of you guys not picking it up.” About them as a crew he often said, The third time is no charm, boy, stressing the endless ways they did not, as raw rookies, measure up to his first two crews. He particularly had loved his original pilot, a man named Sewell he described as an “ace tyro,” who flew their plane with a tender, sad care. “Some of these guys, they wrestle and fight the thing,” he liked to say. “Sewell, he understood what I call Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal.” Sewell had been killed in a manner Lewis did not volunteer information on.

He pointed at Snowberry, whose mouth was slightly open in childish concentration, as if he were going to sneeze. “This is what I’m talking about,” he said. He twiddled a cup grimly. “We’re going after the best air force in the world, on their own ground. They don’t have tours — you stay on till you get killed. Makes for guys who are real good. And real unhappy. Which makes them mean. They go head to head with Gordon Snowberry, Jr., here.”

“God help them,” Snowberry said.

“We’re the best Air Corps in the world,” Piacenti said. “Aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Lewis said. “Listen, you fire eaters. I’m not taking on Bean without help, next time. You and you are going to help me.” He pointed at Snowberry and Bryant.

“Come on, you guys,” Bean said.

Lewis tucked in his shirt. A cup handle hung from his belt loop. “My old football coach used to tell the defense, ‘Boys, I want you to show up in groups of two or more and arrive in a bad humor.’”

“You’re not funny, Lewis,” Bean said. “I hope you know that.”

“I appreciate the thought,” Lewis said.

After he left, Bean stood amid the crockery uncertainly, as if it had been his fault. He was an affable and quiet boy who closed his eyes when chewing his food, and Bryant liked him generally.

“Don’t worry, Bean,” he said. “He’ll find someone else.” He joined the rest of the crew, though, in being more or less satisfied that the abuse was centered mostly on Bean.

Snowberry said, “The thing about Lewis that’s hard to keep in mind is that he doesn’t have any good points.”

“I know he’s just kidding,” Bean said. He seemed to doubt it.

At mess Bryant suggested to Lewis he lay off.

Lewis opened his mouth and displayed some masticated food and then looked away. Bryant felt that he’d disappointed him.

“What’re you going to tell me?” Lewis asked. “‘Dislike May Split a Crew’?” It sounded harsher than Bryant would have liked, and he turned away, embarrassed. That had been pretty much what he had been planning to say.

“You think that’s stupid?” he eventually said, trying to sound assertive. Lewis was on his second tour and the rest of the crew regarded that amount of experience and the decision to reenlist with nearly equal awe.

“He’s not any good,” Lewis said. “He’s helpless as a gunner and as a radio op he couldn’t pick up the BBC.”

“He’ll be all right,” Bryant suggested.

“Look,” Lewis said. “I’m flying with him. I can’t teach him his job. I can teach him he’s not all he should be.”

“That’s a nice thing to teach someone,” Bryant said.

“I like to do it,” Lewis said. “My pleasure.”

Bryant felt chilled. He saw himself as no more competent than Bean was.

“Remember the kid from Idaho?” Lewis said. “Navigator? They figure now he thought he had the plane over the North Sea, by his figuring. Told the pilot to get down under the cloud, if he could, to look around. Only they were over Wales. Mountains.”

“He got mixed up,” Bryant said.

“Yes he did,” Lewis said. “Anatomically.”

Bryant ate, intimidated.

“Let me tell you something,” Lewis said. “We don’t have mistakes on Paper Doll. I don’t allow them. I personally don’t allow them. If Gabriel won’t make a thing about this, I will. You make a mistake, it’s your ass on a stick, and I’ll put it there. And you look like you make plenty of mistakes.” He turned his head, and Bryant after a pause stuck out his tongue. “We make a mistake, we’re dead. You make a mistake, we’re dead. Bean makes a mistake, we’re dead. Ten people. You figure it out. Keep that in mind. There are no excuses. Some Nazi flies up our ass because I’m daydreaming in the tail, I’m going to get on the interphone and go, ‘My goof’?”

Bryant had a headache, around the eyes. It seemed his training every step of the way, from high school all the way to England, had been inept and incomplete. His number one goal in high school had been to avoid humiliation — not excel, not learn, not stand out, simply avoid humiliation — and he was distressed to have learned that things hadn’t changed in the Army. He was more frightened of Lewis than of the Germans, and Lewis knew it and used it. Bryant knew nothing. In high school history his senior year they had spent a week coloring in the countries of Europe — blue for France, black for Germany, cross-hatching for the conquered areas — and his Germany Proper had stretched from Normandy to Leningrad. His teacher had held the paper up to ridicule in front of the class. His high school English teacher had shown three weeks of sketches she’d done of the Acropolis and then had tested them on Greek tragedy, and he’d gotten a 17 as a score, on a scale of 1-100. At the bottom of the test he’d written, “Nice sketches,” and she on the report card that went home that fall wrote, “Non-constructive and childish attitude.” He’d seen her on the street a week before he left and she’d congratulated him on becoming an American Eagle, and he’d said, “Why don’t you shut up?”, wishing he’d had a wittier rejoinder.

Lewis took Bryant’s roll and smoothed whitish margarine onto it with a finger. “Ah, we were as bad as you are,” he said. “Worse. We were cockier. We used to shout, ‘You’ll be sor-ry!’, at incoming crews. You get over that fast.”

“Not funny,” Bryant said.

Lewis leaned dangerously far back in his chair. “I’m in love with Gene Tierney,” he said. “I’ve got it bad, and that ain’t good. We’ve got this afternoon to kill. Any ideas?”

Bryant shook his head, and Lewis pulled a small assemblage of leather straps out of his pocket, and unfolded it. It looked like a small and complex muzzle.

After a moment of silence Lewis said, “It’s a cat harness.”

Bryant went on looking to indicate he needed more information.

“I’m thinking about organizing a cat throw,” Lewis said. “You interested?”

Bobby Bryant shook his head. “I’m disgusted, is what I am,” he said. “Really and truly.”

“It’s absolutely safe,” Lewis said. “This design is based on our parachute design. Distributes the stress.”

Bryant finished his milk. “Who says our parachutes distribute the stress?”

“You got me there,” Lewis admitted.

“Why don’t you do something normal?” Bryant asked. “Like read a magazine?”

“Or smell the flowers,” Lewis said. “Or both at the same time.”

“Well, don’t tell Bean, whatever you do,” Bryant said. Bean loved cats. It dawned on Bryant that that was the point.

Lewis said, “You just go read a book, Commander. Maybe this isn’t your event.”

They sat together under a huge hangar door and looked out at the steady drizzle. Ground school had been canceled and no one was forthcoming with any reasons why. The day had clouded up badly, as expected, and the sky was a depressing color. On nearby concrete engine block supports, water marks from the rain drooped like icing. Piacenti, Bean, Snowberry, and Bryant were rolling dice.

“This is what they call ‘bright intervals,’” Piacenti complained.

Snowberry was picking at his scalp. “Now usually I hate bedbugs in my hair,” he said. “But this one had that Certain Something.”

They hadn’t formulated a game and were simply noting who rolled higher numbers. It was not an interesting way of passing the time. Bean and Piacenti sat with their backs to the hardstand and behind them in the distance a small knot of men had formed around Lewis. Bean glanced over his shoulder and returned to the dice.

“What’re they doing over there?” Piacenti asked.

Snowberry shrugged. A small flailing object was tossed upward, a thin cord twisting behind.

“Lewis is having a cat throw,” Bryant said. He had decided he owed it to the cat.

Bean stood, without turning. “Was that a cat?” he asked.

The cat gained speed behind them, swinging now in a distant ellipsis around Lewis’s head.

“He wants you to go over there,” Snowberry said. “That’s why he’s doing it.”

“Someone should do something,” Bean said.”

“Did you hear what I said?” Snowberry asked. “It’s a trap.”

“That’s wrong. It’s horrible,” Bean said. He turned from them and took two steps out into the drizzle.

“Concentrate on what I’m saying,” Snowberry said. “T-R-A-P.”

Bean strode off.

Snowberry rolled the dice. “No hope,” he said.

Bryant and Piacenti stood up, as well, and Snowberry looked up at them in surprise. He said, “All right, all right,” and got to his feet. He added, “He showed me the harness. It was well designed.”

They walked through the light rain in an echelon, like gunfighters. Bryant felt self-conscious and faintly silly.

Snowberry squinted ahead at Lewis. “Imagine,” he said, “if he’d turned his genius to good, instead of evil.”

The men were cheering in the chilly drizzle. Ahead, Lewis had given the cord a few sharp wristy turns and let fly, sailing the cat out over the tarmac. It flew with legs outspread, like extended landing gear. It landed with some force and scrabbled up, stunned. Lewis and the men made a show of calling off the distance, footstep by footstep, and Bean reached the cat first, bending over it with a tenderness evident even at Bryant’s distance. Bean looked over at Lewis and the men with hostility and Bryant could see the cat’s tail curling slowly and alertly behind his protective back.

As they closed in on the group, Lewis asked for the cat and Bean refused to give it. Lewis hit him in the face and he fell onto his back. The cat sprinted free and crouched nearby, indecisive with fright.

Snowberry and Piacenti tried to break it up, and someone from Boom Town jumped on Bryant’s back. Bryant recognized him as a tech sergeant named Hallet and abruptly found himself twisting on the wet tarmac on his side, trying to free himself from an armlock. Hallet tore at his hair.

“Hey, you guys, an officer,” someone said.

Gabriel broke it up with the shaky authority of a more or less new first lieutenant. Bryant pulled himself clear with a hot ear and a painful scalp and slapped Hallet’s hand away. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Are you crazy?”

He trooped them into the hangar, out of the rain. Bean’s mouth was bloody and the blood bubbled onto his chin. Lewis rubbed a toothmark out of his knuckle. Bryant’s ear was burning and he wondered what Hallet had done to it.

Gabriel confronted them with his hands on his hips. “So,” he said. “Let me ask you: have any of you come across, in your experience, the phrase ‘Dislike May Split a Crew’?”

Bryant gazed straight ahead. He could not look at Lewis.

Gabriel proceeded to dress them down. He was only a first lieutenant and not a very impressive one, though he meant well. Bryant thought about bacon.

He asked them if they thought he liked having to do this. “Is it that you don’t have enough to do?” he said. “Do we have to fill up every minute to keep you out of trouble?” Boredom was getting to be the explanation accepted for any of the aircrews’ actions that seemed unusually peculiar or pointless.

Bean and Lewis and Bryant spent the night guarding the fuel bowsers — huge, hulking, and filthy trucks that fueled the Fortresses before missions. The bowsers did not need to be guarded. The rain was a good deal more insistent. They stamped their feet endlessly in enormous shallow puddles and Bean hunched as though that would save some part of him from the wet, and touched his mouth tenderly with the tips of his fingers. He grumbled once that he got into trouble every time he associated with them, but otherwise the three of them remained silent, with the rain a steady rushing sound around them, and the chilled water sweeping down Bryant’s back under his rain gear like a sluice.

Ground school was back on the next morning. The weather was awful and there’d be no flying for the third day in a row. No one was complaining.

Bryant had arrived early, with Willis Eddy and Bean. Aircrew filled the seats in the briefing hut without excess enthusiasm. There was always the vague and unspoken hope that at some point they’d pick up something useful. Those attending expected little, did not sit quietly or refrain from cracking wise, as Snowberry called it, and remained stubbornly scattered throughout the room whatever the size of the crowd. They chewed gum and tested postures which might seem at once insolent and military. They yawned languidly. Someone nearby faintly tapped out what sounded like Gene Krupa. Bryant noticed Sam Hirsch alone a few seats ahead.

“What do you know about Hirsch?” he asked Willis Eddy. He hadn’t seen much of Hirsch, but he figured Eddy and Hirsch, bombardier and navigator, crammed together in the nose of the plane, might have had more contact. Eddy’s position was right up in front in the Plexiglas nose, over the bombsight, and Hirsch was right behind his seat, at the navigator’s table.

Eddy shrugged, uninterested. He looked over his shoulder as if hoping someone more intriguing might show. “Not much,” he finally said. “Doesn’t say much. From Chicago, I think.”

“Who’s he friends with?”

“Who knows?” Eddy was ready for a change of topic. “I don’t know much about Jewish guys. I guess, you know, they keep to themselves, we keep to ourselves.”

“What ‘themselves’?” Bryant asked. “He’s one guy.”

“Look, whaddaya want from me?” Eddy said. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“He’s kinda quiet,” Bean offered. “He seems like an okay guy to me.”

The three of them shifted for a better look and pondered the back of his head.

“Let’s go sit with him,” Bryant said. He hoped it didn’t sound too virtuous.

Eddy rolled his eyes.

Bryant and Bean moved up a few rows. Hirsch acknowledged them and returned his attention to the day’s instructor, who was pinning up some charts. They involved black silhouettes of aircraft from various angles, with large single letters beneath them.

“How you doin’,” Bryant said.

Hirsch nodded. “How you doin’.” He nodded at Bean.

The instructor introduced himself to guffaws as Lieutenant Mipson. He called for general quiet. Someone in the back sang the first bars of “My Old Kentucky Home.”

“I don’t see much of you around,” Bryant said.

“I don’t see much of anyone around,” Hirsch said.

Lieutenant Mipson sat, apparently relying on his dignity to provoke a general hush.

“Well, you should come along when we do things,” Bryant said. “They’re a pretty good bunch of guys.”

Hirsch looked at him, and nodded.

A staff sergeant helped pull the screen down in front. It slid back up, and there was scattered laughter and applause.

“I’ve never known any Jewish guys,” Bryant remarked, and wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. “I grew up in Rhode Island, and I didn’t meet any.”

Hirsch didn’t respond.

“I hear there’s a big one coming up, maybe, when the weather clears,” Bryant said. “Maybe even Berlin.” When the conversation flagged, rumors were a help. No one knew anything.

“I’m a Jew,” Hirsch said. “We don’t fight. We sit in the rear, going ‘Here’s five hundred. Keep attacking.’”

Bryant laughed. The lights went out. The screen to their right lit up for a second or two, flashing an aircraft silhouette, and went dark.

“Right. Any ideas?” Lieutenant Mipson called.

“An Me-110,” someone called out.

“An Me-210,” someone else said.

“A Bristol Beaufighter,” a third voice called.

“I didn’t even see it,” Bryant whispered.

“An Me-110,” Lieutenant Mipson said. The men hooted and laughed, delighted with the lilt in his voice. All officers and desk warriors were continuously watched for any signs of cowardice, hypocrisy, or effeminacy. “This?” he said, and a plane flashed for what seemed less than a second. Bryant had no idea.

There was a short silence. “Gene Tierney,” someone said. Everyone laughed. It was Lewis.

“Try it again.” He flashed it once more, for a bit longer.

There was some coughing. “I was better off when I wasn’t looking,” Bryant whispered.

“A Heinkel?” someone offered.

“What sort of Heinkel?” Mipson said into the darkness.

“An obscure one,” Snowberry said from somewhere behind him.

“A 189,” Mipson said.

“That’s a 189?” Bryant asked.

“You, Sergeant.” Mipson pointed to Bean. “What’s this?”

Bean gazed at the screen, his eyes like a rabbit’s caught in the headlights. “Sir?” he said. “A Dornier?”

“A Mosquito,” Mipson said. “About as wrong as you can be, Sergeant.”

From the back someone made the sound effects of skidding tires, smashing glass.

Lieutenant Mipson announced a spot quiz, with some weariness. “Ten planes for two seconds apiece,” he said. “Take out papers and number them from one to ten.”

The lights came back on, and it was noisy out of all proportion to the task supposedly being performed. They numbered their papers, and waited. Bryant’s column of numbers strode off to the left as it descended. The lights went off again. Men made kissing noises.

“One,” Mipson said. A Focke Wulf 190 appeared on the screen.

There were boos and hisses. “Gene Tierney,” Lewis called from the back.

“Quiet,” Mipson scolded.

Another went up. A Dornier something, Bryant knew. 217? He glanced at Hirsch’s page in the gloom.

Another. An Me-109. The men cheered the most familiar silhouette in the Luftwaffe.

Seven more went by. Bryant figured he’d gotten five. They were gone so fast. The lights were back on, and they were stretching and trying to look at each other’s papers.

“Now the chart,” Mipson said. He went from A to Q with his pointer. Then they did lookalikes from confusing angles. Bryant mistook a Spitfire for a Messerschmitt.

They filed out peeved at their ignorance and angry with this kind of desk fighting anyway. Beside the door was a morale poster, a drawing of a Focke Wulf 190, probably the best of the German interceptors, with its broad snout comically exaggerated, its squared wings shortened and absurd. The caption read Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wulf? Beneath it someone had written, We are. Following that was a row of signatures, running off the paper and a good ways down the wall. Lewis Peeters was the first name on the list. He’d also drawn in, in some detail, the Focke Wulf’s underwing cannon.

After the afternoon session Bryant and Hirsch waited for Snowberry and Lewis to file out. Hirsch seemed reluctant to wait. Bryant called the two of them over when they emerged, but when they arrived he discovered he had no real idea of what to say. They stood in a foursome awkwardly. Hirsch was an officer, a second looey himself, which made things more difficult. They were tech sergeants.

Lewis tested and worried a loop of string, the movement of his hands relaxed and intricate. Snowberry regarded the process, then Hirsch, with interest. Lewis said, “Lieutenant, maybe you can answer a question Strawberry here is having trouble with. You’ve seen us in action as a crew. Think we have a chance of getting through the doors of the mess without hurting ourselves? What do you think of what we got here? A wop at one of the waist guns, this Long Islander in the top turret, and Strawberry, who should be thirteen next April, in the belly.”

“Rhode Island,” Bryant said.

Hirsch gave the matter some thought. “Seems an all right group,” he said. He sounded wary.

“And then the lieutenant here,” Lewis said.

Hirsch gave him a tight smile. “I have to go,” he said.

Bryant watched him leave. “What’d you do that for?” he asked.

Lewis said, “Bryant, sometimes you are so rock stupid that it makes us want to sit down and cry for the Army.”

“What? What’d I do?” Bryant asked.

Lewis repeated his question, adding a little more whine. The effect was not flattering. He said to Bryant, “Remember you said you wanted advice before, from an old hand? Well, here’s the advice: Don’t make plans.” He repocketed his string and left with Snowberry without issuing an invitation to follow. Bryant straightened his belt and tried to appear as though he had a reason for standing alone where he was, feeling like someone just in from overseas, without a buddy in the world.

He sulked the balance of the afternoon. He sat near the hedges on the perimeter, under the overhang of a small house which served as an information booth and guard hut. The mist glazed his boots and the dry area beneath the overhang resembled a small beach. He had more mail, from Robin, so the sulking was easier to pull off. As far as he could make out, though, he was unnoticed where he was, and his irritation in all likelihood remained unrecorded. Half the squadron was up practicing assembly and cooperation with escort fighters, and the rumble above the cloud cover was constant and exciting.

Robin was Robin Lea, an Englishwoman who lived with her mother two villages over. She was in training as a Civil Defense clerk. They’d seen each other four times and she’d charmed and fascinated Bryant each time. She had spoken to him persuasively about the failures of appeasement and the sorts of insects they’d find, were they to dig up the earth ridging the hedgerows. She was kind and patient with what he felt to be his stupidity. He had confided to her his fears of inadequacy and she had assured him that many of his friends, Lewis included, probably felt that way too, and that it was most likely a reflection of his growing knowledge. He had danced with her the third time they’d been together and she’d worn a green silk dress that had flexed and shimmered with light. He thought she was very beautiful.

Lewis and Snowberry were mainly interested before meeting her in finding out if she had what it took. He’d done his best to describe her and had finally settled on comparisons and had left them with the suggestion that she was a “heavier Gene Tierney.” It had gotten a big laugh. They’d never forgotten, and Lewis’s adoption of Gene Tierney as his pin-up love afterwards had not been a coincidence.

Bryant had protested their laughter, and Lewis had responded that he didn’t like the sound of that “heavier.” “You can tell us,” he had said mildly, with paternal sympathy. “Is she a lard-ass? Is that the problem?”

“In England, the term is ‘overlarge,’” Snowberry said. “As in, ‘That freight car is overlarge.’”

“Aw, the hell with that,” Lewis had said, wrapping an arm around him. “Looks aren’t important.”

Snowberry and Piacenti had hooted and wondered aloud if Lewis liked boys.

Lewis said, “What we need to know before we give our blessing is this: has she got a good heart? Will she take care of him?”

“He says she looks like Gene Tierney,” Snowberry said.

“He’s right,” Lewis said. “She’ll take care of him.”

They had been watching a dull three-legged race organized by the special events, or morale, officer. He was a gawky and shy Iowan so useless his duties had since been unofficially assumed by Stormy, the weather officer. Snowberry had gone from finger to finger on his outspread hand ticking off his reasoning. “Here we’ve got a good crew, a Christian crew, a stable crew, and what happens? Cheating, fornication: Could the Axis Have Planned It Better?”

Bryant had protested, feeling the color coming into his face. Piacenti had looked dubious. He had asked Bryant if Bryant had told Lois about their “just seeing each other.” Bryant had hemmed and hawed.

“There it is,” Snowberry had said. “We know what Bryant wants and we’re all disgusted. Why don’t we just come out and say it?”

“C’mon,” Bryant said. “I don’t know what to do. We haven’t done anything. I don’t even know if I should keep seeing her.”

Lewis wondered aloud just who was in the driver’s seat.

“This is stupid,” Bryant said.

They had cheered for their team in the three-legged race, Lambert Ball and Willis Eddy, who were trundling along the course dead last. “Bigger question,” Lewis had said. “Is it just the hots? Is the Brit better? Now didn’t he compare what’s her name — Lulu—”

“Lois—”

“Lois — to someone else, for us? Another movie star? Before he met Gene Tierney?”

“Yes he did,” Snowberry said. Snowberry had always claimed to be the smartest kid in his high school, and at times like these Bryant could imagine it: the wise-ass kid, always ahead of the teachers. “Remember? Jean Arthur, he said.”

“She does, sort of,” Bryant said miserably.

“I’ve seen her picture,” Snowberry reminded them. “I think he means Chester Arthur.”

“How about Sergeant Bryant?” Lewis said. “Two movie stars, not one. And he claims he’s got troubles. You’re wasting our time. And taking advice from those who truly need it.”

“Who’s Chester Arthur?” Piacenti asked.

“So one knows about the other but not the other way around,” Snowberry said, summarizing. “Well, it’s the Army way. Though you’re not going to meet my sister.”

“Look,” Piacenti had finally said, irritated and trying to bring a little common sense to bear on the subject, “so you got a girl back home and a girl here. I don’t see the news. Some girls, you know.” He made a motion with his fist. “Other girls you marry.”

“It’s not like that,” Bryant murmured.

“It’s not like that,” Piacenti repeated. He looked at Bryant as if he’d messed himself. “Look: what’s so difficult? I got a fork, I use it for meat. I got a spoon, I use it for soup. How complicated you want to make this?”

“Everybody repeats everything I say,” Bryant said.

“Listen to Il Duce, there,” Lewis said. “He made the trains run on time.”

Bryant’s sulk had petered out without attracting much attention. Everyone was staying inside because of the drizzle. A small boy peered around the side of the hedge delineating the base perimeter. “Hello,” the boy said.

Bryant said hello. He thought, Why is he standing in the rain?

“Are you working?” the boy said. He was round-faced, with light hair. “Are you planning a bombing mission?”

“They’re all planned,” Bryant said. “Now I’m reading letters.”

The boy hesitated. “That’s very nice,” he eventually said.

Bryant opened Robin’s letter. “What’s your name?” he asked. The boy was wearing black shorts so large his knees were covered. He was scratching a leg with his shoe.

“Colin,” he said. Bryant made a show of starting to read. “Are you from Texas?”

Bryant shook his head. “Rhode Island.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know where that is,” the boy said after a while. The mist fused his light hair together at the ends and darkened it. Bryant pulled Robin’s letter from the envelope and counted the pages.

“Do you know anyone from Texas?” Colin asked.

“I may,” Bryant said. “I’m not sure.”

The boy was apparently working his courage toward something. Bryant waited a moment before beginning to read.

Dear Bobby,

Your letter made me happy and sad — happy because it recalled you so vividly to mind, and sad for the same reason. You are too far away. You have a worrisome occupation. I am alone, save Mother. Those are enough reasons to be sad for now, I think.

Mother’s visiting her eldest sister, my aunt Susan, for the week, and I’m rattling around the place alone (save the geese). In my training program there’s some sort of confused reorganization going on, or consolidation, so I’m perfectly idle this week and the next two. Mother has suggested that there are many things I could do in town. I’m trying right now somewhat unsuccessfully to persuade myself that I am not afraid of spiders in the bath or baby bats in the shed. If I want to live in the country so much, I tell myself, I have to get used to the night creatures and night noises of a house.

The house: the house is a lot of work as well as pleasure. I have barely any time at all for my painting. There is little that doesn’t need help, from the garden to the roof slates. Another thing I can do with this time to myself. I’m trying to do as much myself as I can. Mother should be spared a good deal, if possible, and if you and Gordon are able to come up and take advantage of our local Civil Defence muddle (Jean, by the way, informs me that Gordon claims to be absolutely certain about visiting), I won’t want the four of us to spend our time tidying up. Today I painted the iron lattice garden gate and those nails you were gracious enough to admire are now largely a very inelegant black. Which makes me wonder if painted nails belong in the countryside. I fear not. Weren’t you the one who claimed to be incapable of imagining me in a farmhouse?

When you come, your imagination will be given a push. The house dates from 1791. The farm part was years ago split up, though there’s still a good bit of land left. I’m afraid it won’t seem very American to you and Gordon — cold stone walls and big rattling windows that let the wind in (in the mornings outside it’s cold and damp, now, and inside it’s colder and slightly less damp). It’s dull this summer, but very pretty. There are cracks all about the house and the stone is crumbling but it’s far from disaster. The garden is full of old twisted apple and beech trees and one cherry tree which has grown from a pip I planted when I was five. There are forsythia and bluebells and roses and primroses — all untame, all very lovely. In a corner of the garden we found an enormous man-hole (eight feet by six feet and carefully lined with stone) which we romantically claim to have been Cardinal Newman’s hideout when the Protestants were after him.

“Any gum, chum?” the boy said. He was still gazing at Bryant, still standing in the same spot near the hedge.

“Excuse me?” Bryant said.

The boy looked crestfallen. “Then you don’t know it,” he said. “I told him you wouldn’t.”

Bryant waited, and the boy removed his hands from the hedge and withdrew them behind his back. “My friend Keir told me if you asked Americans that way, they gave you chewing gum. He said you found it amusing.”

Bryant fished some gum from his pocket. “He was right,” he said. He leaned forward and handed the gum around the side of the hedge.

“Thank you very much, Sergeant,” the boy said.

“Well, you tell Keir he was right on the beam.”

“I will,” Colin said. “And I hope you remain alive, Sergeant. I have to go now, I’m afraid. Thank you for the chewing gum.”

He waved, and Bryant returned the wave. He watched the boy cross the open grassy area bordering the base and disappear, finally, down the lane.

“I hope you remain alive?” he repeated to himself. He shook his head.

After scrubbing floors and washing windows and repairing mattresses and sewing curtains I was quite fatigued with the indoors and ready for the garden. I asked my neighbour who around here knew about gardens, and the Hampdens arrived.

Lucky me. The Hampdens owned and ran a small plant and feed shop and have retired, it seems, to my back garden. Mr. H. was rather suspicious of my free time, but he’s come around, I think. They’ve provided some expertise, aid, and company, and we spent the last two days gardening in some fairly heavy rain. Again, not very American, I suspect, but something one does, gardening in England. It’s beginning, they tell me, to resemble a real English garden — with the variety and colour. You scoff, I’m sure. I’m not certain I know what makes an English garden (Mr. Hampden likes to say a watering can, some fertilizer, and three hundred years): the rock beds, the beautifully level and rich grass, the sense of age, of hidden surprises.

I’ve been trying to learn the botanical names for the new plants: this morning I pointed out a delicate one at my feet and said “Arabis,” proudly, for I suspected I was right. “Arabis variegata,” said Mrs. Hampden. “Variegata,” I said, as though that were obvious. “Is that Latin?” “No, dear,” she said. “English.” The dictionary says from the Latin variegare.

Mother, and the gardens, and the Hampdens, are almost enough. But almost is not it, is it?

I’m well. I’m fairly happy. I hope you are well. I hope you are safe. I’m very much looking forward to your visit. Mother has said there’s plenty of room for Jean and Gordon, so you shouldn’t worry.

The enclosed, perhaps, I should explain. It comes from my realisation that only watercolours can match some English colours. Though this — my first attempt with flowers since thirteen — conveys only a bit of what I’m trying to send. Please take care of yourself. I hope to see you soon.

Robin.

In the envelope — Bryant had missed it at first — was a piece of cardboard, with a watercolor of a spray of small starburst-like flowers of an intense blue, over green stalks and dark brown earth. It was labeled Endymion nonscriptus (English Bluebell).

That night he lay in the Nissen hut on his bunk, the enlisted men’s quarters cramped enough that an outspread arm would touch Snowberry, sleeping soundly to his left. There was a mission on for the next morning, though the weather was again problematic. Apparently someone was tired of waiting.

He dreamed of Training, of Basic and Gunnery, and he woke and lay still, his friends’ quiet breathing filling the space around him. Snowberry’s breathing had a slight wheeziness to it that always inspired inappropriate tenderness in him, as though he were listening to an infant son with the croup. The metal canopy of the Nissen roof above made random and hushed sounds in the wind. The air was close. The blanket beneath his nose had a flat, airless smell, and beyond it the darkness was chilled. Bean’s socks were somewhere nearby. Outside the rain was returning, the soft rush on the aluminum light and uneven. He imagined the canvas flaps on the fuel bowsers, billowing and wet in the darkness.

He remembered field-stripping the fifty-caliber Brownings day after day at Harlingen in the dreamy Texas sun. In only shorts and boots, on a square piece of olive canvas dusty and patinaed with grit. The gun was heavy and difficult to manipulate, smooth with oil. There were cocking levers and bolt assemblies, firing pins and sears, belonging to a system of order which had to be retrieved once broken down, and Bryant had always been the slowest, the clumsiest. He mashed fingers and skinned palms repeatedly wrestling with oil buffer body spring locks. The procedures were difficult to hurry, though the stripping and reassembly were being timed. In the intense heat there was an unpleasant, dreamlike effect of having to do something rapid and intricate while submerged in warm water. Men he knew slightly and would never know again were spread in distant rows on the canvas squares across the baking and flat earth. The impression was that of a series of desolate, individual picnics. On good days shirts were piled and tied sheik-like on heads, and the rotating, depressing, releasing, and the click and clatter of interlocking metal components coming apart proceeded with a more ordered if still-hesitant smoothness.

There was one instructor, a Sergeant Favale, whom he remembered with fondness. Favale was a heavy-set Italian who’d been through two whole tours and seemed almost thirty, and had always had for Bryant a sly and kindly manner to go with an impossibly coarse sense of humor. Favale had guided him through the field strip drills, always benevolently late to start the stopwatch, with long and pointless dirty stories that he now understood had been intended to help him relax. Bryant remembered the surreal discomfort of having to endure the drills blindfolded and wearing flying gloves, oversized and lined with sheepskin, that soaked up their sweat and swaddled their arms in the heat like great floppy weights, while Favale reported his sense of what ways of dying most flyboys preferred. Bryant had fumbled and lost parts and Favale had ticked off flak, anoxia, shellfire, burning. He remembered clearly the exhilaration of finishing and ending the frustration, tearing off his blindfold and gloves to grin sweatily up at a happy Favale, the two of them looking around at others still working blind with their oversized and swaddled hands, like prisoners of a mysterious sect. A hopelessly frustrated boy, still blindfolded, had called out to him across the spread tarps, “What way do you want to die, Sergeant?”, and Favale had said, “Boys, the only way: I want to melt and drain out my prick.” The tarps had rocked with laughter, and Bryant remembered the moment, blindfolded and laughing boys all around him slapping their thighs with gloves like enormous weighty potholders.

He remembered Favale as having pins and plates everywhere in his body, everyone knew, having been wounded over France, all two tours of missions done. He remembered Favale’s small fat figure in the late afternoon on the thirty-caliber range, a lunar plain with stumplike mounts in a lonely line, the instructor off firing absently by himself, the tracers a curving hot arc under the sun, bouncing and trembling where they intercepted the target.

He woke again in the night from a dream in which Snowberry and some Germans had been pointing at the nose of Paper Doll and laughing.

Gabriel had pulled rank for the name in Gander. The final choice — he remembered Miss Behave and Wrecking Ball as other finalists — had been explained to him in a complex and confusing way and was lost to memory. A series of in-jokes had been involved. He hadn’t been unhappy with the name, though he remained slightly uncomfortable with the suggestion of flimsiness. But that was part of the bravado, he understood: with the Flying Fortress, word was you could fly into a cliff and need only to replace the Plexiglas afterwards. You could joke in those terms.

He remembered standing outside their cold and low Nissen hut and Snowberry’s noncommital attitude toward the winning name. Snowberry had crouched beside him against the cold wind, stroking the greens and grays of the lichen and pronouncing the words for the new plane, Paper Doll, and this new place, Gander, slowly, exaggerating the enunciation.

All of them but Lewis had met as a crew weeks earlier, in Florida. Lewis had joined them in Britain, much later, a replacement for a boy named Fichtner who’d been the original tail gunner, a pale boy from Missouri with white spindly hands who told them only that he was a musician, and cleared his throat with a quiet precision that annoyed everyone. He had seemed anything but their idea of a Southerner, and they had been frankly relieved to discover he’d gone AWOL one morning soon after their arrival in Britain. There was an official notion of crew compatibility as the basis for assignments, and if they were in a group with a guy like that, Piacenti had wondered aloud one night, eyeing Bean as well, what did that say about them?

They’d imagined themselves arriving by train from all parts of the country to come together as a permanent crew, a lean and single-minded fighting force. As they got to know each other, the suspicion grew that there had been a series of unobtrusive mistakes, that the selection process had involved dice or cutting decks of cards. The immediate blood bonds they had heard about seemed something for other crews, and they got to know each other slowly. Other crews seemed more confident, more raunchy — their slang for anything casually masculine — more competent.

Florida struck Bryant as the way he would have imagined a casual penal colony. They slept on raised wooden platforms screened on four sides with canvas traps. Bryant assumed a steady stream of lethal nightlife passed routinely beneath the boards and listened for every scuttle. Bean hectored them into the night about the horrors of the insects’ size and persistence, and distinguished himself as well by being maddeningly clumsy around the zippered door, his embarrassed and muted struggles when returning from the latrine letting in clouds of mosquitoes which sang and tortured Bryant in the humid darkness until he found himself spending hours resolving to kill Bean and stuff his mouth and ears with insects.

The field looked as though it had been leveled in an afternoon. Half-crushed spider lilies with thick white stamens and stinging nettles grew and bloomed at oblique angles, and stagnant puddles filled the bulldozer tracks, giving off at dusk still more mosquitoes. Palmetto swamps bordered the asphalt runways. While they waited for their first Fortresses, they stayed out of the sun and flipped gravel at posing lizards and gazed at the groups of brown and ugly B-24’s spread along the aprons like giant dragonflies in the waves of heat. They sweated through their shirts by seven each morning and talked with enthusiasm of their good fortune in drawing Fortresses. When the Fortresses finally appeared, they delighted in comparing the two heavy bombers: the Forts, like swept-back and low racers with their noses in the air, alongside the hopelessly boxy Liberators, each with all the military aplomb of an old flying boat. They liked to say that the Liberators were the crates the Fortresses had been shipped in. When the time came, they flew two unremarkable orientation flights in a tired old E variant, their first B-17.

Bryant had risen early the morning of that first flight and had gone over the plane nose to tail with the ground crew chief as the sole flight engineer for the first time, feeling fraudulent and redoing and botching checks, whispering to himself. He had waited, later, until Gabriel was seated in the cockpit and gazing at him pointedly before officially pronouncing the engines ready, in a voice so constricted with fear over the interphone that Snowberry had later compared it to Andy Devine’s. The four old Wright Cyclone engines, decommissioned after fifty or so missions over God knew where in France and Holland, performed with efficiency, and by the end of the flight his checks had become routine. His confidence had grown. He had imagined his fellow crew members admiring his steady professionalism, and then had discovered that Gabriel had been having the crew chief double-check the important systems.

They had flown without warning from the Floridian heat to the Newfoundland cold. Fichtner had sat on the gray and cold rocks of Gander like a seabird. They’d flown from Florida to Texas to Iowa to Newfoundland and he was disoriented by the changes. The crew had treated him as they might have treated a strange dog in camp that was behaving erratically. They spent much of their time waiting for assignment to a bomb group, pulling chairs around the stove of their Nissen hut. The stove had thrown off heat so feebly they had nicknamed it “the Icebox” and had all urinated on it together the day their orders had come through.

Besides Fichtner, only Bryant and Snowberry spent any appreciable time outside. The sky was gray and roiling and close, and clouds moved aggressively offshore, flapping windsocks and causing splashed mud to spatter dismally and unpredictably. Gulls cried and sideslipped over Fichtner, who spent whole half days off by himself, perched above rocks washed black by the swells.

They had sat in small groups the night of their transatlantic flight, Bryant talking quietly with Snowberry. The water was black and vast over the rocks beyond the airstrip. Seabirds huddled near the leeward sides of the huts like pigeons, their feathers puffed against the cold. The support staffs had gone ahead by boat, and the aircrews would make the flights alone, under cover of darkness. They felt isolated and closer, not only as a squadron but as a crew. Reticent girls in blue Red Cross uniforms at a makeshift canteen served them a sad and metallic tea while they waited. All of their gear, stowed in huge green duffels, had been piled in the nose, and they were waiting for a cold front to pass. The wind was high and the sky low and opaque and they could hear the sea. Ice glazed Paper Doll’s rubber tires like doughnuts. Hirsch and Gabriel and Cooper worked the charts and reckonings, and rechecked agreed-upon headings by flashlight, their murmurs reassuring.

On takeoff he remembered clearly the sensation of the plane gathering speed in the darkness in its rush down the runway, and the gentle shift in his stomach as the Fortress lifted into the air, banking around to the north. He climbed into his station in the top turret for the view and saw the lights of the field behind and below them, turning slowly away, and the red lights of the Fortresses ahead of them, lifting into the cloud cover. They climbed until they broke through the clouds like something emerging from the sea, and the half moon illuminated the entire world.

Far ahead they could see the other 17’s. He stayed in the top turret, his weight back on the turret’s padded sling. His goggles were up on his forehead and the elastic strap bunched the crown of his soft, sheepskin-lined headgear. Cooper and Gabriel threw shadows in the yellow glow of the cockpit before him, and the enormous wings extended out beyond him dark and reassuring on both sides.

The stars were brilliant and foreign and extended undiminished to the cloud line. Every so often Hirsch’s head appeared in the glow of the smallish astrodome in front of the cockpit, taking a fix with the sextant. The plane tipped and rocked smoothly. His toes curled and flexed in the sheepskin linings. St. Elmo’s fire shimmered and glowed furtively around the wingtips and propellers. Hirsch intruded on the interphone in a low voice to give new headings.

Still hours from first light or landfall in Ireland, Bryant had felt completely happy in a world all those back home could never know. Below, everyone but pilots and navigator slept, deep in sheepskin jackets with collars up, curled around parachutes and duffels. Above, Bobby Bryant rode high in the cold dark air in his glass bubble under the stars and watched Paper Doll all around him sweeping toward Ireland, across the darkness, skimming the fluid and onrushing ceiling below, the smoothed and ever-changing clouds a ghostly topography.

They woke him with a flashlight, the glare harsh in the darkness. Men were making startled and angry sounds and the orderly on wake-up duty was going from bed to bed uncovering faces and giving blanketed legs a hard shove. He called the briefing time, 0330, in a clear and tired voice, without malice. The lights flicked on and off. Men cursed and thrashed under bedding and someone down the line of steel bunks, dreaming or awake, called Sylvie, Sylvie, don’t you go away now.

Bryant stretched, miserable. Bean lay as if stunned. Lewis sat on the side of his bunk with his feet on the floor and his hands on his face. Bryant could feel the shock of the cold on Lewis’s soles. Metal lockers were slamming and johns flushing. Snowberry was calling, “Oh, Mama, can’t we fight in the daytime?”

Piacenti went by with a towel over his head, fumbling with his kit. The far end of the hut remained dark and quiet, the other crew, not flying today, ordered and still, as if breathing or movement might give them away, children hoping the heavy snowfall has canceled school. The last time, too, this crew had not gone when they had, and Bryant remembered one of the guys off the hook guffawing like a loon in the dark.

They were angry and quiet at the latrine, annoying one another in the limited space around the sinks. They stood in their underwear and flying boots, warming their feet in the sheepskin lining and shuffling from mirror to can. Only Snowberry was somewhat cheery, remarking on the cold. Bean blinked repeatedly and tottered around like someone coming out of anesthetic.

Bryant dressed slowly, shivering, with razors still ringing faintly on the sinks in the uneven light. Beside him Bean was having trouble with the knot of his tie. When he finished, the knot was badly shaped and off-center and he pulled on a thick Army issue sweater, a dismal pea green in the electric light. Around his neck he crossed and recrossed a silk scarf — his lone Red Baron gesture — stitched from a salvaged parachute. He grinned.

An Order of Dressing had been stenciled on the wall near them:

1. Underclothing.

2. Uniform.

3. Trousers (folded inside boots).

4. Jacket (slightly open at top).

5. Boots (outside trousers).

6. Oxygen mask (lines clear).

7. Hood (skirt inside jacket).

8. Gloves.

A number of parodies were outlined beneath it. Snowberry’s Order of Defecating was a general favorite, but Bryant did not resent any system of checks, however ridiculous. He patted the pockets of his overalls to reassure himself that what he had carefully packed the night before still remained, and joined the crowd shuffling outside to clamber onto the open backs of the trucks for the drive to the mess hall. They sat with legs hanging and swaying from the back, quieted by the hiss and spray of the mud from the trucks’ tires. It was misting and the mud seemed more difficult than usual for the trucks and drivers. Someone closer to the cab mentioned the possibility of a scrub, and Lewis told him to shut the fuck up. At this point going and not going were both miserable prospects; a scrub meant the long emotional unwinding, all of this for nothing, and no progress toward the magic total of twenty-five missions which established a tour. And speaking about a scrub was sure to produce one.

At the extended breakfast tables they were served coffee which tasted faintly alkaline in warm, thick mugs. And toast and powdered GI eggs cut into squares and topped with a small floweret of grated cheese. The color and texture were unappetizing. Bryant ate without speaking. Bean looked ill and rubbed his neck tenderly. Piacenti ate all of his food and drank all of his coffee and sat quietly with his hands on both sides of his plate.

It was still dark when they filed into the briefing room, an oversized Nissen hut. They sat on narrow wooden folding chairs, feeling gradually more frightened and more excited. There was a low platform before them facing the rows of chairs, lit by theatrical spotlights hung from a steel beam overhead. Near the front it was very hot and near the rear it was cold. The middle seats were in demand. A staff sergeant from Plum Seed held a brown and white puppy slack in his arms, the puppy’s ears curled back in apprehension. Bryant thought briefly of Audie, who’d taken to sleeping in the backs of jeeps in the motor pool. Once she’d been discovered by two captains only after they’d reached London, when they’d tried to pile their dates into the back. Some of the guys called her Stowaway Canine.

The CO spoke briefly of the dangers of collision after takeoff and during assembly in such weather, and reported that the chances of mid-air collision had been assessed as two planes in a thousand. Someone from the back excused himself and wondered aloud if the CO had any idea which two.

They crowded before their lockers and tumbled the final layers of outerwear — lined leather jackets and pants — into piles that shifted together at their feet. Oxygen hoses coiled into sleeves and interphone cords snagged on gloves. They sorted hurriedly through their equipment as though Paper Doll were priming to leave without them, and wore and carried everything to more waiting jeeps. They overloaded the jeeps until they looked, in the gloom, to be a convoy of college pranksters, and rode to the revetments and Paper Doll in the dark, Lewis swinging way out on a running board, bouncing with each jolt in the darkness. They called out as they passed their plane and the driver executed a flamboyant turn and jerked to a stop. They piled out, dumping their equipment into heaps, and the truck shifted gears and roared off, its light jouncing through the mist toward the other 17’s farther down the line.

Tuliese was poking carefully around beneath the number two engine. The sky was paling to the east and it was beginning to feel like morning. They gathered around Hirsch expectantly, and he went over in subdued detail the navigational data, just when and how they would end up where. Bryant ran through his series of checks with Gabriel and Cooper, gazing at his own panel and over their shoulders into the cockpit at the rows of lit-up information. Beyond the cockpit the nearby windsocks emerged like ghosts and flapped energetically, and water tracked and veined the Plexiglas. They were going to scrub, Gabriel theorized disconsolately. They were so socked in they couldn’t even see the tower. Bryant climbed to his perch in the dorsal turret and looked around. He could make out only the dull glow and occasional flashes from I Should Care, less than a plane length away. “If they send the flares up, we won’t see them anyway,” he murmured to himself.

Another jeep swung by and stopped and a voice from it called out a fifteen-minute delay. “Do you register, pilot?” the voice said.

“Chew my thing, Sergeant,” Gabriel called from the cockpit.

“Thank you, sir,” the voice said. “We don’t chew things.”

With the extra time Bryant ran through additional power plant checks with Tuliese, who seemed unusually defensive and unhappy, and with nothing further to do left the plane and crouched next to Snowberry, who had long since made himself comfortable on a small pile of parachutes. He was surprised to feel how tired he was already.

Stormy, the weather officer, came by on foot, with extra boxes of candy in his new unofficial role as morale officer. He was an earnest and gently funny man, who took his inability to predict the weather with any accuracy seriously, and they liked him. He seemed to genuinely wish he could fly with them, and to genuinely worry about them. He had instituted the tradition of the Living Safety Deposit Box with their crew and the crew of I Should Care, holding on to their valuables during a mission. Valuables turned out to the aircrews to mean only watches and letters, and Stormy had just come from I Should Care and had eight watches on his arm. The pilot and the navigator kept theirs. Bryant peeled his from his wrist, and handed it over. Snowberry did the same. They declined the Baby Ruths with thanks.

They could hear other jeeps, and headlights illuminated parts of Seraphim and I Should Care and swept toward them. One of the jeeps hit a bump and the beams jerked upward and down, as though fencing with the darkness.

“Lewis borrowed Tuliese’s jeep,” Snowberry commented. He was eating peanut brittle from his flight rations. “More ammo.”

The jeep roared up and jerked around with a rakish and dangerous tip. Lewis climbed out and started unloading boxes and loose belts of fifty-caliber ammunition.

“You’re going to kill somebody driving like that,” Cooper called from somewhere off in the darkness.

“I’m paid to kill somebody,” Lewis said. The cooling jeep made ticking and shuddering sounds.

“Is all that authorized, Lewis?” Stormy said, and Lewis told him to have sex with his mother.

“Back there in the tail I just want me, my flak vest, the armor plate, and all these fifty-caliber gewgaws,” he said.

They helped him ferry awkward and spiraling belts into the tail, and coiled them into every conceivable space, in and out of the storage boxes. When they had finished, Lewis gave them each an extra belt for their stations.

“There’s a reason you’re not supposed to do this, you know,” Snowberry said. “The tail’s gonna be so heavy we’re gonna end up leaving you behind.”

“That’s fine, too,” Lewis said. “One way or the other, I’ll get by.” He called to Tuliese and flipped the jeep keys in the crew chief’s general direction. They rang on the tarmac and Tuliese was left to hunt around in a crouch, moving in slow arcs like someone sweeping mines.

They waited in a small group, squatting and sitting. The B-17’s around them were becoming clearer and the runways faintly luminous. Various figures moved about.

“I’m going to write a war book someday, I think,” Bryant said. He thought again of his high school English teacher with her sketches of the Parthenon, and her assessment of him. His holster rode up the small of his back. “Only in this one no one’s going to get killed.”

Neither Lewis nor Snowberry chose to respond. Stormy wished them well and left. Cooper and Gabriel paced by, gazing worriedly down the runway.

Lewis shifted audibly on his pile of equipment. “You write a war book and no one gets killed,” he said. “I don’t know what you got, but it isn’t a war book.”

Snowberry sang disconnected bits of a Crosby song to himself, his voice too low to carry.

Piacenti was in the plane looking for something with a flashlight, like a prowler. He climbed out of the waist hatch and stood over them with his hands on his hips. “There’re bugs or something in the waist,” he reported. Mist drifted from his words. “Hornets.”

“Hornets,” Lewis said. “In England.” He sounded profoundly unhappy.

“Tell Bean,” Snowberry said. “He’s the bug man.”

“Check it out,” Bryant suggested softly. “See what they are.”

“Your ass,” Piacenti said. “I’m not going in there.” He blew on his hands.

Lewis said, “Isn’t this something? We’re ready to get killed, but not get stung by hornets.”

Hushed noises floating over from I Should Care sounded like someone straightening tool boxes, double-checking gear, doing something recommended and orderly and useful.

“My parents had this cabin once, on the Jersey shore,” Lewis said. Snowberry hummed softly. Bryant studied the morning light on the undersides of the clouds, annoyed with the prospect of a long story at this point and finding it difficult to listen. He was growing more convinced that a scrub was a near certainty.

“We used to run around over some back acres,” Lewis said, “us kids. Once, in the middle of these bushes, thick bushes, surrounded by trees, we found this ’34 Nash — green with green upholstery — just sitting there, with no roads out and no roads in and no way on God’s earth it could have gotten there. Perfect condition. There were leaves and stuff on it, of course. All the windows rolled up. Trees all around it, and these were big trees.”

It was clear enough now to make out the doors and Plexiglas canopies and turrets, and Willis Eddy in the bombardier’s station up front sneezed violently.

“I’ll tell you,” Lewis said. “No way of figuring it. We’re being tested every day, boy.”

Piacenti snorted. “Somebody gonna do something about these things?” he asked. He was peering tentatively into the waist, his weight on his heels.

“Maybe it was a bootlegger’s car, or something,” Snowberry suggested. It was the first indication he had been listening. “Some gangster left it there for the getaway. Al Capone.”

Why don’t they cancel it if they’re going to cancel it? Bryant thought. Instead of making us all sit around here like idiots.

“That’s the thing; there wasn’t anywhere to get,” Lewis said, standing and flexing a leg in front of him. “It was like the trees grew up after the car got there.”

He went in after the hornets, Piacenti following and Snowberry covering their rear. The plane was brightening and detail took on clarity. The fifteen-minute wait had long since passed. While they were inside the fuselage, shifting gear around in the search for the insects like someone rummaging through a closet, notification came to stand down, that the mission had been scrubbed. Bryant made futile and angry jerking motions with his hands down into the gravel and thought, How is Lewis going to get all that ammo back? He hated everything for being harder than it needed to be and sat with his legs spread before him like a child, winging loose gravel and small stones and whatever else his hands swept up from the tarmac at the gray space beneath the body of Paper Doll.

Later in the afternoon the sun came out to mock the entire enterprise, giving the ruts everywhere beside the hardstands and around the base buildings a dusty instability. Snowberry found him beneath a tree, watching the smallish clouds of dust drift from trafficked areas in the distance.

“Tuliese is working on the ball,” Snowberry said. He had chocolate or dirt on his chin. “You wanna come look?”

Bryant got up, officially interested, as flight engineer, with all mechanical problems having to do with Paper Doll. They crossed long empty warm-up areas. Some of the crew of Geezil II were playing football with a rugby ball. Bryant could hear one staff sergeant — Baird? — shouting Yah, yah, yah as he sprinted wide to turn the corner. His duds were greasy and worn in the seat.

Tuliese was on one knee, leaning precariously beneath the ball turret, tools fanned out beside him in the shade of the fuselage. On the back of his fatigues he had stenciled May Your Ass Never End Up on a Drumhead. The clip and case ejector chutes for the turret were disassembled and curled neatly inside one another on the grass.

“It’s the hydraulic line,” Tuliese said, instead of hello. “With this turret, it’s always the hydraulic line.” He had hung rags of various sizes from the barrels of the machine guns. Bryant thought of the Italian clotheslines in North Providence.

Tuliese knew what he was doing, and their working relationship was such that Bryant was asked only to contribute his presence much of the time, to testify to the importance of what was going on. Snowberry, more in the dark than he was, and with more at stake in this case, this being his turret, poked closely at the nozzle assembly and offered odd and tangential suggestions. Tuliese accepted them the way he might have a child’s, and Bryant recalled a Saturday Evening Post cover, a tow-headed boy offering incongruous tools to help with Dad’s Hudson.

“I heard this horrible story from Billy Mitts,” Snowberry said. “Belly gunner in the 100th. You hear it?”

Bryant shook his head. There were a lot of ball turret stories going around.

“This guy was in a Liberator that went down short of the field in Long Stratton — did one of those numbers through a thicket, ended up in big pieces all over some guy’s estate. The belly gunner came out of it without a scratch.”

Bryant nodded. “That’s a great story,” he said.

“Listen, listen,” Snowberry said. “This guy, he gets out, it turns out, he’s the only one there. He’s calling and calling, and crawls around the pieces, no bodies, no nothing. Turns out everybody bailed out. They gave the order and his interphone must’ve been shot out. He’d come all the way in and crashed alone.”

Tuliese snorted to indicate that the idea appealed to him. He was feeding a new length of flexible hydraulic line onto an accepting nozzle.

“I can’t get over that,” Snowberry said. “It gives me the jeebies just thinking about it.”

“Listen,” Bryant said. “The word ever comes to jump, I’ll make sure you’re in the know. My mother’s honor.”

“Just leave a note for him, Sarge,” Tuliese said. “Plane goes down, it’s every man for himself.”

“Come on, Tuliese,” Bryant said. “He doesn’t think it’s funny.”

Tuliese looked at him without sympathy. Sweat stains under his arms connected at his sternum. Word was he hadn’t changed his undershirt since landfall in England.

“Why not?” he said. “He thinks everything else is.”

Lewis and Snowberry enjoyed speculating on Tuliese’s family’s political orientation, as they did with Piacenti. Tuliese asserted that his family was American, having come over from Genoa years ago. Lewis and Snowberry called them the Black-shirts.

“Hey, come on,” Snowberry said. “Imagine coming in alone like that?”

“You think that’s bad,” Tuliese said. “You oughta ask Peeters about that poor son of a bitch in Cheyenne Lady. Ott. Dick Ott.”

“Is this the guy in the tail?” Bryant asked. He hated when the conversations took this you-think-that’s-bad direction.

“Ott? The wacko guy?” Snowberry asked.

Hydraulic fluid squirted from the line connection across Tuliese’s arms. “This guy, don’t ask me why he isn’t off making pencils right now. He was on a ship called Flying Bison, they’re not even over the Channel yet, barely at altitude, and something goes wrong with the oxygen to the waist gunner. He passes out. Pilot goes looking for air and drops them eight thousand feet but panics and pulls out too fast, and the control cables go, and then the whole starboard wing.”

Many of Tuliese’s stories carried a cautionary component involving reckless pilots damaging well-maintained aircraft, with fatal and grotesque results.

“The wing root pulls the bomb bay doors off, they shear back through the fuselage, and tear off the tail. Ott’s in it alone, ass over teakettle at twenty-four thousand feet. It’s spinning like one of those seed pods gone nuts. The windows won’t give and the centrifugal force is pinning him against the seat. He finally kicks his way around to face the opening and tries to squeeze by the seat assembly. And gets his shoulders caught on the armor plate.”

They sat rapt, listening to a story they’d heard before. The only sounds were those of Tuliese’s tools.

“He must’ve been at a thousand feet he finally got clear, got his chute open, hit with a helluva crack, broke both legs. Rest of the plane came down in the same field, like a brick. Nobody else made it.”

“Lewis told me that story,” Bryant murmured.

“This guy is still flying.” Tuliese said it as though it had a terminal eloquence about the mental state of flyboys. “He screams at night and sometimes, a guy told me, they find him moving his bed so it’s at a right angle to the other beds. Me, I’d think I was Napoleon at that point.”

He sat back on his haunches and farted with some finality, surveying the turret.

“Who told you that?” Snowberry said. “About the beds.”

“Guy who bunks with him. Same crew. Pissbag Martin.”

Snowberry and Bryant nodded, accepting the source. Martin had been named for his inability to control his bladder in combat. He was pretty well known, bladder aside, for being one of the calmest and more accurate gunners in the Group. Lewis had said, in their presence, “At least he scares ’em every now and then.”

Tuliese repacked his tools and left without mentioning whether or not the turret was now fully operational. After he’d left, they sat with their backs to Paper Doll’s tail wheel, the aileron over their heads an enormous low ceiling, like a boy’s hideout.

“Did you know I hadda stretch myself to get into the Air Corps?” Snowberry asked.

Bryant looked at him. He’d swallowed some of Snowberry’s stories before and had been made to look foolish, the slow kid who caught on last, or last before Bean. “What’re you feeding me?” he said.

“No lie. They said I was too short. I rigged some cable between two poles and hung there, two full weeks, on and off. I had bags of sand on my feet.”

It was possible. Bryant couldn’t read his expression. “Weren’t you worried you’d stretch your arms?” he asked.

Snowberry nodded, ready for that. “I hoisted myself up and hung with the cable under my armpits,” he said.

Bryant said, “Are you going to tell me you think bags of sand made you taller?”

“All I know is, I’m in now,” Snowberry said comfortably. “And I wasn’t before.”

Bryant thought, He’s pulling my leg, and resented it. While Snowberry made contented squeaking noises with his cheek on his gum, he thought back to Gunnery Training, missing skeet, missing towed targets, missing first with the.22, then with the shotguns, then the thirty calibers, the fifties. He didn’t fully remember how many of his test scores Favale had fudged for him. He thought about his position and the level of ability he had demonstrated and grew frightened and unhappy with his secret, sitting under the expanse of tail. He was both anxious and relieved that no one understood how poorly trained he was.

“It’s a funny war,” Snowberry said.

Bryant thought he understood what Snowberry meant. He had tried to write to Lois about it, but didn’t have the words to express his sense of the boredom and tension together, the unreality of the whole thing, and the fear.

“It seems like nothing’s happening, you know?” Snowberry said. “And everything’s happening.”

Bryant agreed. “It’s like you just sit around, or you’re like Famous Walter,” he said.

Famous Walter had become famous, unhappily, as the Two Hour Replacement: having just arrived at the base he’d sat down to mess, been told he was needed as a last-minute replacement in the tail of Banshee, and had been killed by flak over Hanover. All they’d gotten in the mess was his first name. Someone else had finished his Spam.

Snowberry clunked his flying boots together at the toes. They were oversized enough to be his father’s. “God, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he said. “I thought they were the end. Girls die for fighter pilots. They only get wounded for us.”

“I was a Lindy nut,” Bryant said. “Were you a Lindbergh nut? He came and gave a speech in Providence and they sold little hats. I think it was about staying out of the war, but what did we care? It was Lindy.”

“Oh, boy,” Snowberry said. “I must’ve made two thousand Spirit of St. Louis’s from those wooden Popsicle sticks. House was knee deep in Spirit of St. Louis’s.”

“I used to play toy soldiers,” Bryant said. “The cardboard kind, with the wood bases. I had a little lead Spirit of St. Louis, used to fly over, strafe the soldiers. I used to have the guys go, ‘Look out! It’s Lindy! Aaah!’ No one stood up to the airplanes. Everyone did a lot of running and dying.”

“Like now,” Snowberry said. “The Krauts: ‘Bryant and Snowberry! Aaah!’”

They laughed. Bryant had a vision of flak crews in Germany chafing at the insult, crossing hairs over the belly of Paper Doll, and sobered.

“You’re all right, Bobby,” Snowberry said. “Lewis is tops, but …” he trailed off.

Bryant was grateful and slightly embarrassed, unsure what he was getting at. He cleared his throat.

“Anyway, I keep, like, a diary,” Snowberry said.

“I saw you working on it,” Bryant said.

“I know you read a lot and stuff.” Bryant read magazines in the day room. “I want to send some parts home to my folks, the best stuff. They’re always telling me to write and I never know what to say.”

“That’s nice, a diary,” Bryant said. The idea didn’t appeal to him.

“Here, you can look at it,” Snowberry suggested. He pulled it out of his back pocket. It was a smallish softcover. Bryant started to hand it back and protested it was private, but Snowberry assured him that it was all right, they were buddies, so Bryant was forced to open it.

The cover featured in red ink a battle-weary GI who’d apparently stopped to write beside a makeshift roadside sign. The sign said My War Diary. The book was already half full.

The margins were crammed with additions and helpful drawings and diagrams — how the arc of the tracers helped him lead a target in gunnery, what approaches he was responsible for defending from the belly. There was a cutaway drawing of Paper Doll, outlining the crew positions, entitled Our Plane.

He flipped to the back, the morning’s entry.

Hi again. Another f-ing (!) scrub. It’s terrible and now we’re all juiced up with nowhere to go. It always clears up later but by then it’s too late and everyone’s a real pain to be around. Lewis you can’t even go near. Trying to guess the weather is awful hard. And harder, I guess, for the weatherman (!) We call our base weather officer Stormy. Lewis says he uses a weejee (?) board. He’s a nice guy, though. It’s real bad for morale, a scrub: we fly eight missions on the ground for every one in the air, and it’s bad to get up and think you’re going to be a day closer to the end of your tour and then find out it’s all blooie.

He paged back to July and Training. There was a small sketch of a latrine with flies and curving lines above it.

I stink, though I’m getting better, everybody says so. I whipsaw everything like I’m using a garden hose and I squeeze off bursts that are too long. My training officer told me he was going to ration me, but he can’t, of course. I have to be through in the next week and a half or it’s washeroonie. I don’t think I’ll wash, though. On the flexibles me and another guy named Flynn flying tandem cut a tow target clear in half this morning, and that’s good work! The tow plane even had it dipping and weaving, like real Jerries.

I still like the idea of being a dentist. I talked to the guy who examined me at the induction center and he said I’d be looking at big money and mucho opportunity after the war and the government would help out in terms of school like I couldn’t believe. Mom’s nuts about the idea, of course, and wouldn’t she be surprised to hear we agree on something. Mom said Liz said I’d never do it because I’d have to wash my hands. Ha. Ha.

Snowberry was gazing lazily ahead, humming “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.”

Bryant said, “You never said you had a sister.”

Snowberry looked at him. “That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t.”

Bryant closed the book and stretched, his finger holding the place.

“Keep reading,” Snowberry said. “It gets better.”

I remember before Dad died we’d go camping out at Port Jefferson. Somebody owned the land and Dad didn’t care, though I never wanted to have a fire, I thought they’d come and start shooting. We went for my birthday once. I loved the woods and stuff. There were never any stores or lights and you didn’t have so much noise. We saw a shooting star. Dad said on my tenth birthday I saw a shooting star and on my first birthday I saw Babe Ruth clout number forty-six on his way to sixty, and he didn’t think if I lived to be a hundred I’d ever see the like of either again. Though of course I don’t remember the home run.

Bryant did some quick figuring, and confirmed Snowberry’s age as seventeen. He was underage, something everyone suspected and joked about.

He thought again with regret about how rarely he was able to remember the kind of father and son stories Snowberry always told, recognizing with a pang Snowberry’s references to the private jokes that seemed the code of a happy family. His only memory of a camping trip had involved a weekend in Block Island with his father. His father had always called it in an unpleasant way Our Only Night Out. He had had to go to the bathroom late the first night and had stumbled out of his bedroll and up the dune ridge. Above him, the night was coming down in curtains, silver and red and purple. He hadn’t been able to think of the word for it, and had called to his father, who’d come hurrying up the dune and then had stopped short and said, “The northern lights. For God’s sake.” But he had wrapped an arm around him.

He remembered it as their happiest time together, maybe their only happy time together. He remembered that they had fished and hadn’t caught anything, and that his father had said, “The buggers are unionized.” His father had pulled from an old pack some bread and a roll of provolone cheese that he called guinea cheese, and then had gone down to the cove sheltered by the dune ridge and had collected saltwater snails in a pan, a small black figure against the wavering light off the water. The snails had looked like little rounded black pebbles, and he had cooked them in saltwater and split them with Bryant. They had had twenty or so apiece, and had eaten them out of their shells with a pin. They had been terrible.

The next night they had had corn dogs and bluefish. They hung netting against mosquitoes on a crisscrossing pole thing he’d rigged up, on a wide flat sandy stretch at the bottom of the dunes on the west side of the island, away from the cliffs. His father had congratulated him on the netting arrangement. They sat at the water’s edge on huge driftwood twisted smooth into horror movie shapes and gutted the blues, the raspberry and clearish fish organs washing away in the rippling dark water. His father had popped a blue’s eye and it had floated a while in a strange blank way before sinking. His father had dipped the fish in some warm beer he’d carried in, and some corn meal, and they fried it over a fire they dug low in a sandy pit. His father had drunk quietly and consistently from a flask and Bryant could smell the rye on his breath. He remembered the rye and fish and saltwater smell. He remembered sleeping looking up through his netting and poles with all the mosquitoes locked out and the stars beyond.

“Pretty good, isn’t it?” Snowberry said. Bryant still had his diary open, though he’d been on one page for a good while. He nodded, and flipped around.

He remembered the sound of the water and the little waves from the boats tied up in the bay. They could hear the boards and planks creaking a long way off. In the morning they were wet and the fog made the water disappear. He remembered the speckled metal cup with the big ACE stenciled cryptically on it, and the heat of the coffee with no milk through the cup to his hands. He remembered the stray dog that had snuffled around while the sun was still pink and low and everything was wet and cold and the dog’s nose snorting in the morning air. Its back leg was badly hurt and it nosed and sniffed them but wouldn’t let his father get near to help. “Poor son of a bitch,” his father had said, and he remembered thinking that the dog was going to die.

That night the projector broke down. Bryant and Snowberry took a reel of Buck Privates from the can and unspooled part of it, holding an open-mouthed Lou Costello up to the light. On another reel they found June Allyson, in color besides.

“They must’ve mixed up the reels,” Bryant said. “Too bad the projector broke.”

“Some of these guys wouldn’t’ve even blinked,” Snowberry said.

They had remained in the darkened briefing room after everyone else had drifted away. Snowberry looked farther down the reel for more June Allyson, whom he called Prince Valiant. He was starting a good-sized tangle of celluloid at his feet. He crooned softly to himself.

Poor Stormy, who’d arranged all of this, sent a tech sergeant off to Supply for a manual. They needed one, the projectionist had theorized, since it evidently wasn’t with the machine. Most of the men had already left in disgust or boredom. The lamp for the machine was still on and light flickered on the sheet hung as a screen. There was nothing to do.

Lewis was sprawled between two folding chairs, flipping through something. Piacenti and Pissbag Martin were playing blackjack on a fifty-gallon drum labeled, mysteriously, USARC.

Bryant straddled a chair and asked Lewis what he was reading.

“Gabriel’s pilot’s manual,” he said.

The others looked up from the card game.

“He won’t miss it,” Lewis said off-handedly. “He only studies it twenty-three hours a day. This is his hour off.”

“Lemme see,” Snowberry said. “What’s it say?”

“It says you should get to know your crew,” Lewis said. “Their strengths and weaknesses.” Snowberry was making shadow animals with his fingers in front of the projector lens. “Listen to this: ‘Of all branches of the Service, the Air Corps must act with the least precedent, the least tradition.’”

Snowberry looked over at him. “That’s not a pilot’s manual,” he said.

Bryant looked closer. “It’s something called Bombs Away,” he said.

“It’s a book Bean brought with him,” Lewis said. “The kind they give kids in school about the Army.” He continued reading. “‘Nearly all the tactics and formations of infantry have been tested over ten thousand years. Even tanks, though they operate at a high rate of speed, make use of tactics which were developed first by chariot and then by cavalry. But the Air Corps has no centuries of trial and error to study; it must feel its way, making its errors and correcting them.’”

“Oh, God,” Snowberry said. They laughed. Hirsch and Willis Eddy wandered back in, and sat beside Bryant. Lewis flipped the manual to Snowberry, who turned a page and went on aloud:

“‘The pilot and co-pilot must fly the ship, that is true, but they take their directions from the navigator, for he knows where they are and where they are going and how to get there.’”

“Where are we, Hirsch?” Lewis asked.

“England,” Hirsch said.

“‘Arriving at the target, the bombardier must take command, for it is he who must drop the bombs on the target safely.’”

“This just confirms what I been saying all along,” Willis Eddy said. He was a big, slow-moving boy who liked to say he reminded people of Gary Cooper. “You’re all just here to get me to the target safely.”

“Eddy here was hell with the practice bombs,” Pissbag Martin said.

Eddy shrugged. He cultivated the impression that he was hard to rattle. “My instructor used to say, ‘Dropping your eggs on a dime from twenty thousand feet is easy. Think of this simple analogy.’”

“What is this Southern drawl stuff?” Snowberry asked. “Who’re you supposed to be, Henry Fonda?”

“He used to say,” Eddy continued, “it was like getting on a bike, riding it past a thimble, and dropping grains of rice into the thimble.”

“Pretty big thimble, in your case,” Lewis said.

Bryant thought it might be time for some esprit de corps. He said, “The whole wing dropped early on that mission. Willis wasn’t lead bombardier.” Eddy’s bombs, with everyone else’s, had been dropped short on Paper Doll’s most recent mission. Eddy was unperturbed and didn’t seem to feel he needed defending.

Snowberry flapped the book to show he was going to go on reading. “‘All during flight,’” he read, “‘the engineer commands the engines and sees that they continue to function well.’” Bryant felt himself reddening, but no one commented. “‘The radio man is the voice and ears of the plane, keeping contact with squadron and base.’”

“You know, it bothers me that I’m a member of an important team alongside the fat kid who never got into games at the playground,” Lewis said.

“‘And all the time the aerial gunners are charged with the defense of the ship. On the sharpness of their eyes and the accuracy of their aim the safety of the whole crew depends.’”

Lewis snorted.

Snowberry said, “Aren’t you the Hottentot! Are we so bad?”

Marksmanship was a sore point with Lewis. He said, “We’re not the Tennessee riflemen up there, if you were wondering.” He had been spending time with them lately on deflection shooting, and not having much success. They had only had time to learn, and relied upon, what the Air Corps officially termed the Zone System. The Zone System was defined as pointing at the offending object, leading it a little, and filling the sky with bullets.

“I think the boys’re doing fine,” Willis Eddy drawled.

“The only way to get through this,” Lewis said, “I figure, is to make the Heinies look for a bigger pushover. You have to turn yourself into some kind of risk.”

“Hell, these guys can’t shoot,” Pissbag Martin said. “The guns’re there so they can show they’re pissed off at being attacked.”

“Sometimes I do get the idea we’re just sort of feeling our way, here,” Snowberry admitted. “It’s like one day I just woke up operational.”

“I don’t know how Billy Barty could shoot straight from that ball turret,” Eddy said. “Twisted up looking down through your legs and all that hooey.”

Pissbag Martin shook his head. “I don’t go anywhere at twenty-five thousand feet you can’t take your parachute.”

“What if we do like you say, Lewis?” Bryant asked. He was thinking while they had been talking that he was going to be up all night again, dreaming of a sky filled with Germans. “What if we do like you say, and then get it?”

“We have a saying for that,” Lewis said. “We say, ‘Tough shit.’”

They were quiet. “Hit me,” Pissbag Martin said, and Piacenti flipped a card onto his two.

“Ah, if God had wanted us to shoot down Germans, he would’ve kept us guys out of gunnery,” Snowberry said.

“‘A boy who can hit a clay pigeon on a skeet range can knock a Messerschmitt out of the air,’” Bryant said. “The instruction manual used to say that.”

“Jesus God,” Lewis said.

Piacenti tried to shuffle one-handed and spilled cards all over his lap. He said, “My mother said there was a thing in the paper back home that said that for a guy’s mother to wear the pin of the Air Forces is to tell everybody that she’s produced a son far above average mentally and physically.”

They were quiet again. A chair squeaked and he collected the cards into a messy pile.

“It’s true,” he said. “She clipped it out.”

Snowberry tossed Bombs Away back to Lewis. “We’re getting to be too negative,” he said. “They’re the ones on the run. We’re going after them in their backyard now. I read somewhere somebody said, Napoleon, I think, said that the logical end of defensive warfare is capitulation.” He repeated it. “I like that phrase,” he said.

“Napoleon was short of Focke Wulfs,” Lewis said.

Pissbag Martin stood and stretched and told them peevishly that he had to go. They could see he thought they were talking too much.

The card game broke up, and Piacenti and Eddy and Snowberry left with Martin. Stormy returned, disappointed that things hadn’t worked out and blaming himself, and turned off the projector lamp. He boxed the projector and pulled the tacks supporting the sheet screen.

While they watched him work, Lewis said, “My father worked as a porter out of Chicago for a few years. I ever tell you that? White porter.”

Bryant shook his head. “You told me you lived in Dayton,” he said.

“We did. He told me once they were coming into a station in Louisiana, bayou country, and it was completely dark. Woman was getting off alone. He’d estimate the station stop — a dirt road — and signal the conductor. He really wants to impress this woman, beautiful West Virginian. She’s oohing and aahing he can see anything at all in this pitch black. He waits and waits and then calls for the stop, and when he throws out the stepdown box, there’s this little splash, and then nothing. All they can see in the dark are these little bubbles.”

He laughed. “I always loved that story,” he said.

Stormy laughed too, distractedly, and gave them the word that something was on the next morning, folding the sheet apologetically and becoming more awkward at their lack of response, as they stayed where they were, each of them quiet and alone now in the darkened briefing room.

The next morning they were part of a forty-plane raid which was to join a larger force headed for Kiel. They had heard that RAF meteorologists were reporting the frequent lows that had covered northwestern Europe for the last two months were giving way to highs, and that Bomber Command intended to take advantage of the upcoming weather in a big way. Lewis had remarked grimly that they might have their next twenty-three missions in twenty-three days, it sounded like.

They never got to Kiel. They never got airborne. Whatever the lows or highs, whatever Stormy’s weak and maddening optimism, at 0600 the sun had not risen high enough to dispel the early morning ground mists, and the bombers ran up their engines one behind the other on the flight line with their olive tails rising above the mist like the dorsal fins of sharks. From his turret Bryant could intermittently see Quarterback, the plane ahead of them. Farther down the runway, the seventh aircraft in line had an engine fail during takeoff and went off the field and into the woods, through the perimeter hedge. The running lights on its tail winked through the fog. Crash trucks began rolling and the B-17’s in line behind became confused. The eighth ship, Miss Quachita, had already started its run, but stopped halfway down, Bryant learned later, having either heard the radio command to cease takeoff or having seen the red warning flares fired by Flying Control. Miss Quachita’s pilot, a quiet boy from Birmingham, turned it around and brought it back up the runway. Coming down the runway full tilt was the ninth ship, Cheyenne Lady, with Dick Ott in the tail and Pissbag Martin in the nose as bombardier. It was carrying sixteen five-hundred-pound bombs stacked in columns in its mid-section and its throttles were wide open. They collided head on, and the detonation snapped Paper Doll two or three feet back on the hardstand, jerking Bryant violently around in his takeoff harness. Martin and Ott and eighteen others were killed instantly, and the pilot and co-pilot of the plane immediately following were savaged by their disintegrating windshield. The column of fire billowed up like an enormous flare, the burned-off mist haloing around it. The runway and its hardbase were torn apart and took five days and nights to repair.

Morale for those five days hit some sort of all-time low. Someone had reported finding a piece of Dick Ott’s flight jacket, where he had stenciled a small white parachute to commemorate the escape from the severed tail, and the crews found the irony hateful. Hirsch kept to himself more than ever. Bean continued to annoy them and now seemed distracted and morose. When he did speak, it was often to make lists for the listener of what he had just been doing. Lewis seemed to want nothing to do with any of them, Piacenti wrote long letters home he then destroyed, and Snowberry sat with his journal, rereading more than writing. They flew practice missions and sat through training sessions sullenly.

Bryant spent his free stretches watching repairs of the runway, or watching Audie sprint from the hedge to the information hut at the outer reaches of the airfield. The dog tirelessly ranged after low-swooping birds with smallish V-shaped tails and chocolate and orange markings. “What are those?” he called to Lewis. “Sparrows?” Lewis was sitting on some stacked rubber tires, penciling notes on a fifty-caliber breakdown sheet.

“Sparrows,” Lewis scoffed. “Me-109’s. It’s a relief to know you’re up there in that upper turret, boy.”

Bryant flinched but felt encouraged that Lewis had responded. He walked over to the tires. Toward the fence Audie slipped in a wide turn and sprawled on her chin.

“I had a dog once,” Lewis remarked. “Looked a lot like Fido out there. We lost him on a trip to a combination car wash and country kitchen. I’m trying to teach Bean a little shooting,” he said, switching subjects without a pause. “In case he’s gotta fill in. He’s all right with a radio, I guess. But Ge-od, with anything else …” He shook his head. “If his IQ drops any more, we’ll be watering him.”

“You should stop riding everyone, Lewis,” Bryant said. “We’re doing all right.” But he was depressed and wasn’t sure he believed it.

“You guys,” Lewis said, “got the best substitute for nerve. Stupidity. Cooper,” he said. “Know how he got ready for this? Pulling trailers around Arizona, thirty-five dollars a shot. Ball used to catch rats in his family’s farm in Pennsylvania. His father gave him ten cents for every rat he got in the barn. Now he makes eighty-five a week and flight pay. You know? You guys can’t learn this stuff in five weeks.” He used the nail of his small finger to clean between his teeth. “You should’ve grown up with guns. Didn’t your father ever give you a.22? Didn’t you ever want to kill anything?”

“It was hard,” Bryant said, apologetic. “I lived in Providence.”

Lewis made a defeated gesture. “So, you know. There’s lots of things you could be doing. And they got you here doing this. With my ass depending on it.”

Audie trotted by and hunched to defecate, edging forward as she did so.

“Why’d you reenlist, Lewis?” Bryant said. He had asked before and Lewis had refused to answer.

“Flight pay.” Lewis rubbed his face. “Why else?”

“No, really. Why?”

“You got something better?” He guffawed. “The girls. I don’t know.” When Bryant didn’t look away, he continued irritably. “You ever check out the other services? Let me tell you something. I did. I transferred in. I was in the infantry. In the early days they said you could transfer into flight training, but I heard the physical for the Air Corps was a killer booger so I figured I’d flunk. ‘Eyes of an eagle,’ and all that. One day we went on maneuvers about twenty-five miles out into the scrub and it rained and then it was about 110. My shoulders, my crotch, my feet, everything was killing me. They started to show us how to disperse in the event of a strafing attack. And this plane flew over and made a couple of passes at us. And I thought, Well this guy didn’t get up at 0400, he didn’t march twenty-five miles, he’s not lying in this shit, and he’s gonna go back and have a nice lunch. Tonight he gets a pillow and the sack and I get the chiggers. That was the end of that.”

Bryant was silent, reflecting on his good fortune.

“Hey, we’re commuters. They live at the war. And who doesn’t want to be an American Eagle? You think Robin’d have the hots if you were some dogface GI?”

“But you reenlisted. You could’ve been an instructor,” Bryant said. But he couldn’t imagine that, either: he remembered Favale, alone on that baked range in the sun.

“Ah, I was staff sergeant. I would have outranked the guys who’d been there for months. That would have been a mess.”

“You could’ve gone home,” Bryant said.

“Home,” Lewis said. “Yeah.”

They were silent. Bulldozers labored and roared to push earth into the great hole in the far runway. Huge rolls of thick linked metal sheeting were stacked nearby, structural support for the concrete. “I want to do this,” Lewis said. “Half of everybody I know from my first tour is dead or missing. I want to kill some of their friends.”

He was angry. “I’m a wrecker. Think about it that way. My question always is, what’s its Fuck-Over Tolerance? How long does it have to be sprayed? How accurately? Does it come apart big or just drop like a dog in heat? I’m checking out everything. 109’s, 190’s. 110’s catch ’em right and the wings go like oak seeds. Coming back on the deck I’ll spritz a roadside shrine, or a barn. Sheep keel right over. Cows pop like mosquitoes.”

“They’re just helpless animals,” Bryant said. He wondered why he felt surprised.

Lewis looked at him appraisingly. “I don’t know what I expect,” he said unhappily. “Most of you gremlins don’t even shave.” He scrolled sweaty residue into visible dirt on his arm. “Look. I don’t know what other guys think, but for me what this is all about is precision. Get good at something. You get good, and you try not to go ass over flak happy. You come through for the nine guys you’re stuck with.”

He gaped to mock Bryant’s expression, and shook his head. “Guys in the 351st named one of their planes The Baby Train. I know what they were getting at, boy.”

“The way you talk it sounds like it’s every man or every crew for themselves,” Bryant said.

Lewis spat with a satisfying arc. “I don’t know anything about politics, if that’s where you’re heading.”

“We’re fighting because of what they’ve done to Europe,” Bryant said, a little shocked despite himself. “What they’ve done to everybody.”

“That’s good to know,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t help me shoot any straighter. It sure as shit hasn’t helped you.”

Bryant could see, over where Audie had been, Hirsch walking the hedge, hand in the green. “Everyone’s so mopey,” he said. “It’s pretty bad, morale.”

Lewis had stopped talking. Then he said, “I knew a guy in high school, used to play football, used to run back punts. Very good at it. I got a picture of him, once, doing it, and I remember his eyes. They were like silver dollars, seeing everything, guys all around him. You need that — super-vision, that nose for trouble. Sort of like wide-angle seeing. All the guys I know still around have that. Don’t worry about shooting. Worry about that. Just help us see.”

“I can do that,” Bryant said. “And shoot people down.”

Lewis nodded. He seemed to have given up. They listened to the rumble of the bomber streams returning from Kiel to the other bases, the bases without their devastated runway.

That night Bryant dreamed of his grandmother, an old Irish-woman who’d gone erratic from drink, and a mental condition the doctors weren’t able to diagnose. She kept flasks in with the linens, he remembered, and behind the big bags of dog food in the nether reaches of the pantry. Bryant and his little cousin had been staying over at her house in Woburn — Bryant was ten, nine? — and the door had flown open and she had stood before them blocking the light from the hall, an enormous silhouette. She held aloft what could have been a whisk. “Who’re you?” she’d demanded. “What’re you doing in my house?”

“We’re your grandchildren,” Bryant had said, in terror. His younger cousin had whimpered, either at the whisk or at not being recognized, and their grandmother had remained like that, a frightening dark shape, watching them as they lay still with their eyes and noses above the protecting line of the covers.

The dream stayed with him through the roust-up and he stood before the mirrors over a sink in the latrine frightened of his grandmother and half asleep. Beside him Lewis was shaving with special care, feeling his jawline continually, and smoothly reshaving areas that offered resistance. The aircrews had discovered that even slight beard growth caused the oxygen masks to leak around the edges. Snowberry was shaving as well, scuffing away unnecessarily at areas Lewis was fond of comparing to a baby’s ass.

Hirsch already had on a tie and an olive sweater against the chill and was filling his coverall pockets with pencils. It made sense to Bryant as he washed his face: he could imagine the terror of having to navigate home without a pencil. Hirsch patted each pocket, thigh, forearm, breast, and hip, and patted them again, absently. He carried his holstered pistol like a box of pastries.

Bryant tramped to the mess hall feeling more or less outside of himself, a novice actor. The men beside him walked as comically overburdened as Okies fleeing the dust bowl. A boxy jeep crossed through the mist some yards away, pulling connected low wagons each of which carried two clumsy and smallish two-hundred-fifty-pound bombs. Ordnance crews were loading late in some instances. The winch sounds of the bombs being shackled in columns into the bomb bays drifted over to them. Armament crews were checking the gun stations within the bombers, and turrets whirred and whined faintly. He could make out men on the wing of l’se a Muggin’ struggling with the canvas engine covers, cursing and sliding on the slippery metal.

It had rained but it seemed possible the mists were lifting. Puddles along the tarmac shone like mercury. They had combat eggs — real eggs — this mission morning, and spirits picked up because of it. Most of the men were smoking, and the air over the tables, Lewis said, looked like Akron on a bad day. Lewis and Willis Eddy were still talking about the promised B-17 G’s. The G offered the additional armament of a nose turret, but Gabriel and Cooper had heard that the double chin created considerable drag, and that in the event of the loss of one engine, keeping up with the flight would be impossible. Straggling behind was suicide. Willis Eddy’s gunnery scores, besides, were abjectly low, and as bombardier he’d be operating the nose turret. They felt a little better about still not having G’s. They all preferred the greater assurance that they could hide in the pack to the extra guns.

“What happened to the biscuits?” Snowberry complained. “The only thing I liked was the biscuits.”

“No biscuits on game days,” Lewis said. “No beans, either. The gas expands at high altitude. Guys fart like rifle shots. Take a balloon half filled up to twenty thousand feet, it’s filled. Take it to thirty thousand, boom.”

Snowberry looked at his eggs with distaste.

They were checked into the briefing room by MP’s with white leggings filthy from the mud. The gunners sat in a line on benches facing the curtained mission board and immediately checked the yarn pulleys alongside it. A good deal was missing. As they noticed, they became even less happy. The more yarn was missing, the more was on the map and the longer the trip.

They were shoulder to shoulder in the soft and heavy flight jackets, and the smells after the morning air were eye-watering: Kreml hair oil, shaving lotion, sweat, cigarettes. Wet dog, toward the back. “This place is always pure armpit,” Snowberry groused.

Lewis leaned across them and gestured toward the curtain. “I love this. Big security production. In a few minutes we find out what the Nazis’ve known all week.” Men around them coughed and stomped their feet as though to keep warm, and hushed their voices in anticipation like a parody of a theater audience.

The CO entered on schedule and they stood in a noisy mass. He had them sit down again — Lewis blew out his breath heavily, exasperated at the suspense — and nodded to the intelligence officer, who pulled the curtain. The red yarn line ran to Hamburg, and an adjacent enlargement showed U-boat yards.

There were scattered boos. Someone in the back held up a civilian gas conservation sign: Is This Trip Really Necessary?

The overhead projector flashed diagrams and photos of the U-boat yards. Intelligence laid out the route, and the expected reaction from fighters and flak. The officer had written, “Out-lying Flak Batteries Dwarfish by Comparison,” the “Dwarfish” hyphenated at the end of the board, and someone from the back asked in all sincerity, “What’s a Dwar Fish?”

“Don’t worry about the flak,” Snowberry whispered to Bryant. “Official word is that it’s only a deterrent.”

“I’m still trying to figure that one out,” Lewis said.

Operations and Planning provided some last-minute operational data, and Stormy talked about the expected weather changes to and from the city. He drew large billowy cumulus clouds on his own chalkboard to illustrate the expected 20,000-foot ceiling.

They were reminded not to underestimate the enemy, a bit of advice they found as gratuitous as anything they had heard since their induction. The gunners were reminded to harmonize at 250 yards, and to remember the bullet streams would converge at that distance and then begin to diverge.

The crews were glum and attentive. They always half hoped for unimportant targets, targets which would not stir the Germans into anything more than their usual hostility.

The CO announced the time and they all set their minute hands to it, and he called “Hack!” and they started their watches again.

“Good luck,” he said. “Remember what’s at stake.”

“What?” someone asked.

The group broke up, navigators heading off in one direction, bombardiers and radio ops to pick up their information sheets, the gunners to the flight line lockers. Piacenti, Ball, Lewis, Snowberry, and Bryant walked in a line carrying parachutes and flak vests to the armament shop to pick up their guns. They piled everything into two jeeps and rode to Paper Doll minutes ahead of everyone else.

The guns were slid into their steel frames and locked in the stowed position for takeoff. The turrets were turned to face the rear. The five of them stood beside the plane, checking the layers of gear and waiting for the rest of the crew. Bryant hunched near the enplaning hatch on the fog-colored underside and dandled his finger around the connecting ring of his oxygen hose. Lewis went off into the mist a few feet and urinated through the circle of his thumb and forefinger.

Gabriel arrived with everyone else and gathered the group in a circle for some final instructions. He talked about the need to communicate on the bogies but to otherwise stay off the interphone. He cautioned Snowberry and Bryant to keep alert for fighters at twelve o’clock high and low, and said some of the scuttlebutt was there’d be a big diversionary raid which might tie up a lot of interceptors to the south. Snowberry was wearing a button he’d gotten from the New York World’s Fair, which read I Have Seen the Future. Gabriel peered at it, and asked if there were any questions. His cap had been pummeled and soaked in water to affect the fifty-mission crush, and when he moved, his unconnected oxygen hose and interphone cable flapped and gestured.

No one else spoke. They lined up to enplane.

“Do the bear dance, Bean,” Snowberry said, and Bean startled Bryant by hopping from one foot to another, back and forth, looking for all the world in his heavy gear and flight suit like a dancing bear. They had all seen this before, and laughed affectionately. Bryant had not. He felt suddenly he was outside even this group. When had Bean started a bear routine? Who had encouraged it?

Piacenti, climbing in ahead of him, turned and displayed an old orange warning tag from the Norden bombsight, and grinned. He slipped it inside his flight jacket and clambered up into the hatch.

Bryant hesitated before the opening, having missed the point.

“Do-it-yourself superstition,” Lambert Ball said behind him. “Can’t beat it.”

They individually ran their preflight checklists from their dark stations, calling in over the interphone. Bryant stood at the flight engineer’s panel and then at Gabriel and Cooper’s shoulders, double-checking their run-through.

They waited. A full hour passed. Bryant felt as if he were wearing a constricting and damp pile of laundry. “Stormy, if you’re wrong, we’re gonna kick your fucking ass,” Lewis murmured over the interphone. They heard rain patter lightly on the fuselage and everybody groaned.

“Isn’t this weather something?” Piacenti cried. He sounded stuffed up. “Sun for the tail and rain for the nose.” Their chatty informality over the interphone was not official operating procedure, but among the crews a certain amount of radio sloppiness was considered masculine.

Bryant climbed into the padded sling in the dorsal turret for a look around. Across the tarmac he could see shining water, broken by birds.

Above them a green flare arced rapidly and crookedly away and immediately the cockpit was furious with activity, Gabriel taking Cooper quickly through the checklist: Alarm bell/ Checked, Master switches/On, Carburetor filter/Open, and Bryant slipped back to his panel to check the engine status. From there Gabriel ordered him back to the bomb bay to the manual shut-off valves of the hydraulic system, so they could check the hydraulic pressure. “No hydraulic pressure, we’re back to Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal,” Gabriel liked to say. Lewis’s Law of Falling Tons of Metal was simple: the B-17, Lewis said, was not lighter than air, and when it came down for the wrong reason, it came down hard.

He could hear the whine of the inertia starter in the wing and the engines caught and fired, and the plane shook with the sound and the concentrated horsepower and Tuliese yanked the chocks away. They began to inch forward. His last glimpse up through the dorsal Plexiglas before resuming his takeoff position behind the pilot was of the mist lifting obligingly like a gray theater curtain.

They taxied behind the other Forts, a long parade of dull green ships, along the perimeter track to the end of one of the short runways, and waited, locking the tail wheel. Four thousand or so feet away were hedges, and a low fence. The planes were nose to tail, foreshortened enough from Bryant’s vantage point to seem an awesome and comic traffic jam.

The ship ahead of them throttled up, hesitated, and began to roll, the grass on both sides of the tarmac flattened by the propeller wash, and gravel and bits of paper flashed up to make gritty sounds against the windshield.

It disappeared into the haze throwing up big wings of spray and they followed its lights, edging up and to the side. Gabriel set the brakes and advanced the throttles all the way. The engine sound created a physical overpressure on the ears and the plane strained and shivered against its locked wheels. Bryant kept an eye on the oil pressure and rpm’s. Gabriel’s hand played over the brake release knob as if refining the drama, and then he released the brakes.

They did not rush forward, they never did, and Bryant hated the disappointment of the fully loaded 17 simply rolling slowly forward after all that straining and racket. He hunched and unhunched his shoulders hoping to affect the acceleration. The tarmac began to wheel by and Cooper called the airspeed in increments of ten, his calls coming more quickly, and Bryant caught a glimpse of a black-and-white-checkered runway control van disappearing along a side panel window and began to feel the great pull of acceleration on his shoulders, and at Cooper’s call of 90, 100, the engines’ sound changed, and they could feel the tail come up, and at 120 Gabriel pulled them off the ground, the hedges and fence rolling softly past the nose, and they bucked and swayed but gained power and swept high over some trees.

They broke out of cloud near their assembly altitude, and Bean gave a fix on the radio beacon of their assembly plane. All around them B-17’s were popping from the clouds trailing mist and carving into the blue sky above, looking for their colored squadron flares. Group leader ships at higher altitudes were firing yellow and green flares in graceful parabolas. Each squadron circled in its section of sky waiting for completion, a horizon of small groups at play, and Bryant watched in wonder from his turret the planes sweeping by opposite and above in a dance of leviathans. Their squadron, Pig Squadron, consisted of two vees of three planes each, with their vee fifty feet ahead and below as the lead vee. With two other squadrons they formed an extended vee, and soon a fourth squadron filled the slot behind them to complete a diamond. They matched with another group after forty-five minutes of laborious circling and maneuvering, and finally came out of a long wide sweep and headed toward the Channel together with a staggered and shaky precision. Above and behind him he could see Boom Town and Geezil II, their belly turrets already cautiously turning.

The Channel eased brightly beneath them and he could see the bulge of East Anglia receding beyond Paper Doll’s huge tail. He could not make out any evidence of their expected fighter escort. He imagined hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots over Holland and northwestern Germany scrambling for their sleek monsters, and clouds of silhouettes from his aircraft spotter charts rising to meet him, Plexiglas canopies glittering over the fuselages with the heartlessness of the eyes of insects.

He double-checked the seal on his oxygen mask, the heavy gloves giving him little feel for what he was doing. Lewis and Piacenti were clearing and testing the guns, and the plane shook, and already he could pick up the ugly cordite smell through his mask. He felt the tremor of Snowberry firing beneath him, and cleared his own guns, pointed away from the aircraft above, and squeezed the thumb triggers on the hand grips that controlled the azimuth and elevation of the guns, and the twin fifty calibers on either side bucked and fired visible tracers with a lazy, drooping sweep. Then everything was silent against the steady background of engines and slipstream. Smoke puffs trailed from the guns of Boom Town and Geezil II.

He swung the turret around at medium speed, the gun barrels tracking the horizon smoothly. The ease of the electronically operated controls reminded him of a ride at a fair. Track the Jerries, five cents, he thought.

“Shouldn’t we turn back?” Piacenti called in. “My gun’s not working.”

“What do you care?” Lewis said. “When do you ever do anything with it?”

They rendezvoused with their expected escort, RAF Spitfires. The Spitfires waggled their wings out of range to show off their markings before approaching, a precaution against trigger-happy Yanks. They roared ahead to the front of the formation, their razored contrail streams like scratches on the ice of the sky.

They continued to ride. The altocumulus and cirrus high above them were sheeted and pebbled like the silvery lining of a shell. His electric suit and sheepskin jacket and pants kept him unevenly warm, but the air was bitterest winter, 40 below zero at altitude. Bryant worried about his suit shorting out from sweat or urine and had heard enough frostbite stories. The air came in blasts through the openings for the gun barrels, and for comfort’s sake he found himself turning away from Paper Doll’s nose. His eyes and temples ached under the goggles and strap.

The interphone crackled and Snowberry’s voice came over low, singing. “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,” he crooned. Contrails began to unfurl from the bombers above them like long streams of white spun sugar, or cottony bandages unrolling endlessly from the engines. They reminded him of enormous wakes from motorboats. The effect with a large bomber group was spectacular. The spectacle was lamentable, considering their position. “When we’re up that high and putting out that kind of contrail signature, I think Rommel in North Africa can see us coming,” Gabriel had once told him glumly. Ice had formed on the upper seal of Bryant’s mask, and there were smallish crystals on his goggles. “Where the treetops glisten/And children listen,” Snowberry sang.

“Can it,” Gabriel said.

Bryant struggled with his mask. It was dark and cold and smelled heavily of rubber, and condensation inside it was dripping down his neck and freezing. He thought of the water freezing in the rubber hose, of oxygen starvation, and his hands shook. Every so often Cooper called them to check in, for that reason. It was Lewis’s private terror that in the tail he’d only be reached too late.

They were over the Dutch coast. There were little thumps and pings occasionally, and Bryant watched smallish clouds with interest as they appeared and drifted backward through the formations.

“It’ll be easier over the target,” Eddy said over the interphone. “Without these little clouds.”

“Little clouds, my butt,” Gabriel said. “That’s flak, you idiot.”

Bryant gave a start. They could feel the delicate musical sound of the light shrapnel. The plane lurched and straightened out.

“That one s.o.b.,” Lewis said. “He’s set up right at the end of the Zuyder Zee. I can see his flashes.”

A burst shook Geezil II above them, the ship rocking and sideslipping.

“He is hot,” Lewis said. “Dick Ott used to call him Daniel Boone. Up yours, pal.” They could hear him chatter his guns out at the ground below, uselessly.

There was a minor commotion.

“Piacenti’s sick,” Ball commented. “We put it in a box, and left it in the bomb bay.”

“War is hell,” Snowberry said. “They shoulda thought about this when they invaded Poland.”

“What’s the matter, Duce?” Lewis asked. “Nervous in the service?”

The plane lurched again dramatically and Bryant felt a momentary terror that they’d been hit. “Wop Barf Kayoes Ack Ack,” Lewis said. “What a story.”

The Dutch coast was disappearing behind them and Bryant was beginning to feel a good deal more excited and frightened. Wherever their fighter escort had been, it was around now turning back.

“‘You fiddle with my shrimp and then you turn me down,’” Lewis sang. “‘You know I can’t do nothin’ till my shrimp’s unwound.’”

“All right, can it,” Gabriel said. “I mean it.”

Bryant could see the cirrus clouds as ice crystals at this height, rippled and thin and extending for hundreds of miles. Around the tail the flight’s white contrail streams converged in a vanishing point like a burst of illumination.

“God a mighty,” he murmured. He felt a peculiar and foolish excitement and a pride in where he was and what he felt was about to happen.

Hirsch called in their position quietly. They were now all looking for fighters, 540 men in 54 airplanes. Bryant swiveled the turret slowly, searching through the polished perspex for the dots. He tried to concentrate, fighting the cold and the plane’s shaking and the erratic ghost flecks from the defects of his own eye. He tested a speck’s integrity by immediately shifting his eye; if the speck shifted with it, it was phony, a momentary unreliability. Bad peepers, Lewis said, killed more people than bad anything else.

Bryant slipped a flight glove off, and touched the gun triggers lightly. The cold metal seared him and he jerked his hand back and fumbled with his glove. He went on watching, his fingers burning with a steady and painful pulse. Cooper called another oxygen check. While they ran through it, each station calling in, Bryant sang to himself the lyrics of “Paper Doll” as some sort of talisman.

Lucky Me! and Milk Run had closed on either side and wallowed nearer, wingtips already alarmingly close to Paper Doll’s. He could see the dorsal gunner in Lucky Me! peering up to the east, a bunched scarf flashing white beneath his chin. They were closing the combat box, making it tighter to concentrate the defensive fire. Above him Geezil II floated down closer, the bubble of its ball turret still rotating slowly.

“Bandits! Bandits!” Lewis called. “Comin’ through past me! What the Christ are you guys lookin’ at?”

Two planes at two o’clock, someone else yelled. Four at two-thirty.

Bryant swiveled the turret around to the front right, his guns tracking over the outboard Wright Cyclone, and six or eight fighters flashed by underwing, gone before he could register them.

The flak was everywhere around them, billowing in round puffs with strings of larger shrapnel trailing downward like legs. He was sweating, he realized, spinning the guns in an attempt to follow the action, his ears filled with bandits being called in and curses.

He spun to face front and angled the guns up to catch an echelon of four fighters coming down across and through the flight, their wings winking light even at that distance. They began taking on features instantaneously and he could see colors, insignia, letters, radio masts, yellow noses, then they flashed past — Me-109’s, he understood. He turned the turret again, his gloves light on the controls, and a fighter leaped at him like an apparition, impossibly close, shocking him immobile, and was gone. Its squared wing seemed to have passed through his turret. The burnt powder smell was thick even through the oxygen mask: everyone else was firing, and Paper Doll was trembling with the power of the recoils. A Messerschmitt spiraled by the nose with pieces tumbling back from its wings.

The air burst right before them, it seemed, just above Hirsch and Eddy in the nose, and he could see red fire within the black cauliflower shape and the air jarred like water in a bowl. The shrapnel rang over the plane like someone hitting it with steel pipes and Bryant shook on his sling until the world came back to level in a long slow sway. He found himself looking through the Plexiglas at another echelon coming around again and finally came to, in some way, and swept his guns around and up and framed in the glass of his gunsight a fighter’s blinking wings as it grew toward him. The fighter was shooting at them, he could see, and the hits sounded around him like thunder and hail on his father’s tin shed, and he became aware of Gabriel screaming at him over the interphone to open up, for somebody to check on Bryant. The German’s tracers flipped and curved by and he hunched his shoulders in the turret instinctively. His thumbs squeezed and the guns deafened him and wrenched with recoil, and tracer streams wove out and toward the fighter which was already gone, flashing its half-S curve beneath them to loop back for another pass. He could hear and feel Snowberry below firing after him, and Lewis.

One Fortress from the flight was trailing smoke from two engines, and falling back. He couldn’t identify it, and didn’t have time. Even at that distance he saw holes stitch by magic in a line across the wing and upper fuselage, and the plane staggered in the air. Its gear fell, and it sheared away and slipped beneath his line of sight.

Another echelon came through, and everyone fired forward, Snowberry’s and Eddy’s and his own tracers braiding and coiling out toward the fighters, and he raced the turret around firing as they roared past in an attempt to track them.

He swept the turret the opposite way, feeling overloaded, overwhelmed. On the interphone Cooper called out bandits reforming ahead, Piacenti tracked one for Lewis, Ball was yelling something. Snowberry said, “My parents’ll kill me. I get killed now, my parents’ll kill me.”

A parachute went diagonally by, the man pulled at a crazy angle by the squadron’s prop wash.

Cooper and Hirsch announced the start of the initial point of the bomb run. From there to the main point of impact they’d be on automatic pilot, coupled to Eddy’s Norden bombsight, flying straight and level. The usual comparison was to metal ducks in a fairground gallery. Ahead of them the flak was concentrated into a barrage box in the area the flak gunners knew the formation would have to fly through. Bryant had heard it referred to as iron cumulus and now he saw it. The shells were all exploding at the same altitude — their altitude — and the detonations merged to form a low black anvil. The first planes of the flight were already pushing into it and he stared in wonder at their apparent survival even as the bursts approached and surrounded Paper Doll.

The plane shook and stayed level. The bursts were everywhere. They seemed to be standing still, not moving at all. The fighters had sheared off to let the flak take over. Eddy continually called Steady, Steady, until Bryant wanted to kill him. Beneath him he could hear Snowberry firing his guns in rage and frustration at flak gunners 20,000 feet below. Above him the bomb bay doors of Geezil II and Boom Town were opening, the inside racks and dark bomb shapes slowly becoming visible. He could hear the doors below him swinging open as well and felt the extra drag on the ship.

A burst over the tail blinded him and tore away metal in finger-like strips. He found himself refocusing on the now tattered vertical stabilizer and he heard someone yelling they were hit over the interphone. “It’s Lewis! It’s Lewis!” Snowberry yelled. “Lewis is hit!”

“I’m hit,” Lewis said.

“What do you want me to do?” Gabriel said. “Park it? Somebody check him out.”

Bryant slipped from his seat, trying to get stable footing below.

“Bombs away,” Eddy called. The plane bucked upward from the release of the weight, and Bryant found himself on his side.

“Bombs’re gone, it’s all yours, Lieutenant,” Eddy said, and the plane lurched as Gabriel retook flying control and wrenched it out of its level path, and Bryant fell again, onto his hands and knees. He struggled back through the catwalk over the open bomb bay to the radio room, and then to the waist position, leaning against the severity of the plane’s bank, past a curious Ball, and stopped when Piacenti emerged from the hatchway to the tail and made an open palm and thumbs up.

Back in the dorsal seat he reconnected his interphone to a flood of voices. Cooper told Lewis to hang on, they’d be home soon.

“I’m fine,” Lewis said. “Just doing my best to bleed to death back here.”

The fighters were back on the return flight, but in diminished numbers and intensity, it seemed to Bryant. Two spiraled through the formation just above him in perfect choreography, flashing their powder blue undersides and black crosses at him before looping out of sight.

What pilots these Germans were! He tracked and fired at them like someone throwing stones at sparrows. Even as he fired he felt reduced by their elusiveness and invulnerability, and found the impersonal nature of their menace unsettling and fascinating. They concentrated on the rear of the flight, and he fired industriously and fruitlessly at a few echelons streaking past until Eddy reported fighter escort coming back to meet them and the last Germans wove away behind them and dipped into clouds and were gone, leaving the horizon beyond their contrails clean, the sky bare.

They began descending over the Channel. Bryant felt exhilarated and lucky and thought briefly about the unknown plane he’d seen falling back. “You’re right, Doctor,” Snowberry said, his interphone making him sound like Walter Winchell. “We never should have called it ‘a silly native superstition.’” The interphone became noisy with comments, everyone asking if anyone had seen what they had seen. When the plane dropped below 12,000 feet they were able to get off the oxygen and felt better and safer breathing freely. Bryant went back to the waist, where Lewis was sitting up, wrapped in blankets. Another blanket was folded behind his head as a pillow. He looked okay, more or less. Snowberry was tucking him in and Ball and Piacenti were working awkwardly around them, stowing the waist guns inside.

Bryant hunched nearer. Lewis shrugged. “No problem,” he said. “You should see my flak vest, though.”

“Are you comfortable?” Bryant asked.

Lewis nodded. “I make a nice living,” he said.

There was a crashing and loud metal sounds and the plane banked violently to the left, tumbling everyone together in a heap, and they scrambled up to Bean’s screams that there were bandits, bandits, and the plane continued such violent evasive action that Bryant pinballed his way back to his station, slamming knees and elbows trying to climb back into his turret, and when he finally pulled himself onto his seat by the gun handles they were rollercoastering low over the treetops, the scattered flight around them at various altitudes also weaving and turning. Behind them a pillar of black smoke grew upward in a staggered column and at nine o’clock someone’s 17 was trailing fire steadily, and they all watched as it sailed into a gently rising hill like a skater gliding into a wall. The concussion gave their plane an extra bit of lift.

Piacenti was cursing in a violent stream, badly frightened, and still trying to unshackle the guns. Bryant spied four black shapes high above them heading back to Germany. “Ju88’s,” he said over the interphone. “Six o’clock high withdrawing.” They were jet black and appeared harmless and unreal, right off the silhouette charts.

Another Fortress came in short of the field. They flew over it and the crew was still piling out, and it looked as if everyone was unhurt. Of the twelve planes that had taken off that morning, nine returned, with Paper Doll one of the last. Gabriel fired flares on his approach to signal wounded aboard, and the meat wagon trundled out to their nose before they’d come to a full stop, but Lewis climbed out of the waist himself, showing off the hole punched in his flak vest and the spent 20mm incendiary shell that had done it. Everyone wanted to see, and his luck was at once considered to be potentially legendary. Beneath his vest the meat of his pectorals had been sheared up a bit, he reported, but it was pretty shallow, and he chose not to ride in the meat wagon. He walked along with them holding the incendiary in his fist happier than Bryant had ever seen him. “Imagine this scar with the girls,” he said. Even more cheering, they all understood, was the seemingly incontrovertible evidence this represented that he led a charmed life, and they flew with him.

Paper Doll’s engines went on ticking and hissing and pinging as they cooled, smelling strongly of diesel. The knees were torn on Snowberry’s flight suit, sheepskin gaping out. “You look like you were hit, too, Sergeant,” Cooper said.

Snowberry shrugged. “Yes, sir. No room. The bolt mechanisms in the guns tear my knees. This is the third pair. The requisition people hate me.”

Their elation for Lewis wore off, and they all suddenly felt exhausted. They stood around empty and silent as if at a horrible party. Trucks carried them to debriefing rooms. They each were allowed a shot of whiskey from the bar and then they argued with each other over what they had seen and what they had done, still awkward in their flying gear, everyone angry and relieved and not giving ground on their version, while the intelligence officers looked and listened and tried to piece together one plausible narrative from all the information.