Paper Doll

Part Two. The Glass Mountain

After they’d been able to eat Bryant found himself back at the plane, restless despite his exhaustion, and he watched Lewis and Gabriel carry out a holes count, clambering over the plane’s upper surfaces and calling out the jagged machine-gun and cannon-fire holes. Tuliese stood below them, his arms crossed.

Lewis stood erect on the stabilizer and counted with his fingers. “We could drain noodles through our tail, Lieutenant,” he said.

Tuliese found a few more holes forward near Snowberry’s turret. “Lieutenant, what the hell you been doin’ to my ship?” he complained.

“You got off easy, Sergeant,” Gabriel said. “I heard Archangel may be Category E, from the Ju88’s.” Category E meant wrecked beyond repair, unsalvageable.

“I heard the pilot of Archangel was so mad about being jumped that he wouldn’t get out of his plane after he brought it in, sir,” Lewis said. “That true?”

Gabriel said it was. “Gus Truncone. He says cannon shells caved in the whole right side of his cockpit. Looks like a single-seater now.”

Lewis climbed down from the tail. “Is the co-pilot hurt?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “He’s dead.”

They were silent, watching Gabriel make his own check.

“And his best buddy was on Home for Dinner, listed as missing.”

“Missing,” Bryant said, angry with the vagueness. They turned to look at him. “Like he took a wrong turn at the mess after breakfast.”

Gabriel nodded. “That’s about it,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

Later the crew gathered around Paper Doll for another photo, crowding around Lewis, who held his battered flak jacket aloft with one hand and the remains of the incendiary shell in the other like a small prize fish. They were all there, uneasy and apprehensive, to celebrate Lewis’s good fortune, all but Cooper, who it was reported had gotten the shakes soon after debriefing, and Piacenti, who had wandered away from the plane before the photo session had been organized, and sat up across the way on the hardstand, watching them.

After chow they walked to The Hoops, the village pub. It rose two stories with a quaint lean and Bean was forever getting over the fact that it had a thatched roof.

Hirsch had not been invited, and Bryant was starting to get used to the idea. Snowberry returned to their table with a large red tray full of the oversized English pints. “The way they water them down, it’s a normal beer, all told,” Piacenti said.

“Great story my old man wrote me,” Lewis said. He downed a third of Bean’s beer and passed it to him. “This guy who lives next to my old man, 4F bastard, right?”

“He’s home makin’ the rounds of the skirts while we sit here like chumps,” Piacenti said. He seemed to be considering whether or not to work up a good anger about it.

“What was wrong with him?” Bean asked. Nearly everything was wrong with Bean, and here he was in the Air Corps, on a B-17.

“How should I know?” Lewis said. “I think he told them he had a trick knee or something.”

“Yeah, and I know the trick,” Bryant complained.

Lewis sipped from his beer and folded his arms primly. “Whenever you guys’re ready, I’ll finish my story,” he said.

“We’re not ready,” Snowberry said. He gazed over at the bar. “Why don’t we tell those guys we’re going to be facing screaming death tomorrow, and that we should have the darts?”

“Go ahead, Lewis,” Bryant said.

Lewis topped off his beer with Snowberry’s while Snowberry stared in ostentatious boredom toward the bar.

“This guy’s wife tells him the sink’s acting up. She’s on him all day about it. He says he’ll look at it.”

“I’d look at it,” Piacenti said. “She’d be lookin’ at this.” He made a fist.

“After she goes out, he looks at it and figures he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He goes next door and gets this friend of my old man’s, a retired plumber, real old guy. The old guy is wearing overalls just like the husband. He climbs under the sink and goes at it. 4F goes down the cellar to get tools. The wife comes back. She sees the old guy under the sink and thinks it’s her husband. When she goes by she gives him one of these.” He made a goosing motion with his hand. “Poor old son of a bitch jumps like he’s shot, cracks his head on the sink, knocks himself out. He’s out cold. Bleeding from the noggin. She sees it’s not her husband, and the blood, and starts screaming. 4F runs upstairs, they drag the neighbor out, but they can’t wake him up. They call the ambulance. Ambulance guys put him on a stretcher. They live in a top-floor apartment. The ambulance guys hear the story and they’re laughing so hard they drop this poor old geezer down the stairs.”

Piacenti sputtered beer over the table.

“He breaks his hip. He wakes up in the hospital his head stitched up, seeing two of everything, and a broken hip. He told my old man the last thing he remembered was reaching for the wrench and a hand grabbed his crotch.”

They all felt the best part of the story was all the trouble caused someone who had avoided the Army. Through his laughter Bryant said, “Imagine what the old man told people who came to see him?”

Snowberry pulled his garrison cap over his head like a bandage. “Well, my neighbor’s wife stuck her hand up my ass, see, and …”

Bean was watching them and smiling, the way he watched the radio.

“Funny, huh, Bean?” Lewis asked. He mimicked Bean’s expression. “Bean’s only here because his sweetie stood him up.”

“Her dog died,” Bean said, in her defense.

“Her dog died?” Bryant asked.

“She stood me up for a dog’s funeral,” he said ruefully. They observed a short silence, out of respect.

“You’re better off without her,” Snowberry said. “She was built like a fuel bowser.”

“Have you seen her? I’ve seen her,” Piacenti said. The head of his beer gave his expressions a foamy emphasis. “Dark rooms are awful good for her.”

“You guys shouldn’t say that,” Bean murmured. “She’s nice.”

Piacenti went for another round and got into an argument with someone at the bar over the darts. Lewis and Snowberry went over to see what they could do.

Bean gave Bryant a wincing smile and they sat opposite each other with their hands folded.

“You think about women a lot?” Bean asked.

“Women?” Bryant said.

“You think about Robin? And Lois?” He added the last question with some embarrassment.

“All the time,” Bryant said.

“I do too, with Cynthia,” Bean said. Cynthia was his English girlfriend. He seemed to believe he’d uncovered something unexpected. “You think you’ll marry Robin? I’m only asking out of curiosity.”

“I don’t know,” Bryant said. He wished he’d gone over to the bar, where Lewis had collected four of the six darts and was negotiating with a stubborn-looking fat man with a flat tweed hat for the final two. The fat man was shaking his head emphatically.

“You think you’ll marry Lois?” Bean was nudging his empty pint in various directions with his index finger.

“I don’t know,” Bryant said.

Bean didn’t respond, and Bryant understood that what he had meant to be bravado had sounded to Bean simply evasive.

The negotiators returned with beer and without darts.

“You’re better off, Bean,” Lewis continued. “Kids, mortgage, it’s not for you. You’re Mister Wild Oats.”

“You know,” Bean said, “it’s funny how quick here you start doing things you wouldn’t do at home.”

“You mean like swearing, getting squiffed, grassing?” Lewis said. Grassing was their term for having sex with the local girls outside of the Nissen huts on the grassy areas bordering the revetments.

“I guess,” Bean said uncertainly.

“Part of fighting a war,” Lewis said. “Ask Bryant.”

“Oh, shut up,” Bryant said.

“Women sap the resolve of our fighting forces,” Lewis confided. “Right now she’s all Mary Pickford. Right, Bean? But once she gets you alone — table for two, summer night, you can’t trust her. They get to working on you and they leave you gasping for air. That’s been my experience.”

Snowberry laughed.

“Gasping for air?” Bean asked.

“What I’m saying is, you gotta take some and leave some,” Lewis said. “Like Bryant here.”

“How would you like a knuckle sandwich?” Bryant asked.

Lewis held up his beer to protect himself.

“Gasping for air?” Bean said.

“You know what I heard?” Piacenti said. “I heard our wing has the highest VD rate in the whole ETO.”

“I heard that, too,” Snowberry confirmed. “Is that something, or what? Talk about men.”

“Listen to Sergeant First Aid Station,” Lewis scoffed. They laughed. Prophylactic stations were being called First Aid Stations in deference to the local Brit sensibility.

“You guys can laugh,” Bean said with distaste. “Some of you put your — private parts where I wouldn’t put my boot.”

The table sat stunned, and then whooped with laughter.

“There may be hope for you yet, Bean,” Lewis said.

The darts came available and they stepped up to the bar, sloshing beer on the floor and each other. Lewis threw one dart nearly dead center and four into the wall. The Englishmen at the bar roared with laughter. “So you’re a gunner, mate?” one called.

“Jealous of the uniform,” Lewis said. “I get it all the time.” He took aim with his final dart. “Focke Wulf,” he said. “Coming up through our contrails.” It stuck on the outside perimeter of the board.

“Hope it’s a big wingspan,” Piacenti commented. They all took turns, keeping track of the points. On close calls they argued the scoring. Bean sat at the bar and smiled apologetically for the noise. Things degenerated until the throwers were lunging and stabbing the board, while the others tried to wrestle them away from it. They pulled the board down from the wall and the barkeep came out from behind the bar and sent them back to their tables like children. They ordered another round as a concession and the barkeep brought it, looking at each sternly as he set the pints before them.

They sipped a while in silence. Lewis’s nose was bleeding, and he was stanching it with a bar napkin.

“Nazis can fly, can’t they?” Snowberry said. It was the first mention of the morning. Bryant agreed he’d seen some awfully great flying.

“Except that we don’t want them flying,” Lewis said, napkin to his nose. “We want them dead.”

Bryant felt himself blushing. He glanced at Lewis but couldn’t tell if he’d been referring to Bryant’s lateness in firing during the first attacks.

“We gave ’em a little something to think about,” Piacenti said.

Lewis snorted. “If that’s so, they’re thinking with big grins on their faces,” he said.

Bryant stood up. He was frightened and ashamed of his performance. “You know, Lewis, we’re really getting tired of your negative attitude,” he said. “You don’t think we have a chance, fine. You don’t have any ambition, fine.”

Lewis took the napkin away from his nose. The blood had formed a bright red oval. “My ambition,” he said, “is to die in my spare time. My ambition is to get something useful into your head so you won’t die the know-nothing asshole you are now.”

Bryant was shaking. “I’ll be outside,” he said.

“Just great, asshole,” Lewis said. He reached for his beer. “I’ll be in here.”

Bryant stormed out and paced the street in front of the bar, rehearsing what would occur when Lewis emerged. It began to drizzle, and he stood under an overhang. After half an hour he weighed going back in, and decided he had more pride than that, and began the long walk alone back to the base.

When Snowberry finally came in that night, Bryant asked what had happened after he left, and Snowberry related that they’d had a smash ’em up game of pub bowling, using the pint glasses, and had mucked it up with some of the locals. Even Bean had pitched in, although he’d been more or less forced to. He sighed happily, and Bryant again was aware of being left out. “You shoulda been there,” Snowberry murmured. “We are beyond a doubt the most destructive group of young men in history, in or out of pubs.”

“Did he say anything about my not coming back?” Bryant whispered in the dark. “Gordon.” But Snowberry was asleep on his back with his mouth open, snoring, and from a nearby bunk Lambert Ball grumbled that God, it was like sleeping in a stockyard.

Bryant spent the next morning going over Paper Doll with Tuliese and after lunch settled under the wing to read letters. Lewis had not spoken to him since the night before and he found himself overaware of any movement to or from the Nissen huts.

Piacenti and Ball were fencing with the detached whip antennas from two jeeps. They called En garde! and made gruesome stabbing noises. Bryant ignored them and they went on with their stamping and lunging.

A letter from Robin had come the day of the mission and V-mail from Lois had come that morning. In addition there was a letter from the village that he didn’t recognize. He thrilled a bit to the notion of a secret admirer and opened that one first.

Dear Sergeant Robert Bryant,

I hope this letter reaches you as it represents my regards. My mother suggested I might write you and thank you for your gift of gum and send support for your difficult task which we are all in together. I sincerely hope you are well and have not been hurt by German action.

Yours,

Colin Best.

On the back of the envelope Colin had drawn a bulbous B-17 with overprominent gun positions, all unerringly spitting dotted lines out to broken and tumbling smaller planes marked with black crosses. From one a stick figure with a pumpkin head fell spread-eagled and grimacing. Happy Shooting! it said underneath.

He sniffed Robin’s letter. It smelled like paper. He opened it. She had compressed her penmanship carefully, to fit more on the page.

Dear Bobby,

Eight a.m. in the damp garden this morning I innocently happened upon eight ravaged gooseberry bushes. In a strange way the sight was frightening. They had been gnawed bare and completely stripped, leaving only branches budding leaf skeletons. What a sight! — like a cartoon post-locust scene. Only twelve hours earlier, or less, the bushes had been healthy, leaved, and berried. We’re at a loss. Birds? They don’t eat the leaves and pips (they had stripped every cherry from the just-ripe cherry tree only the night before last, leaves untouched and messy pips strewn over the stones below). Clearly this unknown gooseberry lover had an appetite — the odd remaining leaf actually seemed to show teeth marks.

Other things. Mrs. H (the retired gardening expert I spoke of) was feeling down the other night — no word of a missing son in Africa — so I suggested a country walk. “I do so love the country,” she said. We walked for perhaps an hour, randomly, round unexplored areas just outside the village. We walked past great expanses of watercress growing in shallow flooded beds. She talked about how she missed her Derek and I talked about you. We walked past trimmed hedgerows, some sleepy sheep, big manors I suggested we’d one day have as our own. I could see she was very curious about Americans but reluctant to ask. She said that she had heard Americans were quite uncontrollable in public places but that she imagined a good deal of that was just talk and that she felt sure my young man would hardly be — and here she looked for the word — a cowboy. I told her how we had met, of your graciousness and our talk concerning the usefulness of the Red Cross. She asked if you were very free with gifts and I said you were generous but not like some. I told her as well that you might have the opportunity to meet.

Will we? Will you be able to arrange the leave? Write or ring up when you can. Mother says she’ll be the strictest of chaperones but I have plotted walks and activities certain to drive her back to her garden. Do you like to swim?

Robin.

He reread the letter, folded it crookedly back into its envelope, and opened the half-sized V-mail from Lois. Boy, what a Class A rat, he thought. He felt harder and pleasingly more like a soldier.

V-mail was photographed and reduced to save space and weight, and Lois had taped a factory newsletter over half her sheet. It was The Minesweeper, out of Groton, Connecticut. He frowned. What was she doing in Groton, Connecticut? The title was surrounded by anchor chains and the words Let’s Win an “E” in ’43. She had written over the top margin, Mama, what did you do in the war? Were you a Wave or a Waac? No, dear, I just hid things for other people to find, and found things others had hidden. He didn’t understand at first, and then the newsletter’s title came back to him, and he chuckled. The headline was They Call Her “Frivolous Sal,” and beneath it were a group of women standing before a clapboard wall, squinting and smiling uncertainly at the camera. There was a thick caption.

Call ’em Frivolous Sal if you care to, but if you do you’re as wrong as Tojo or “that funny little man in the dirty raincoat,” Herr Schicklgruber. The girls pictured above are employed in this yard — in the electrical shop, the copper shop, Navy warehouse and tool rooms. They’re doing their stuff!

Reading from Left to Right: Ilene Reavis, electric shop; Jerrie McManamy, cable room; Naomi Lundgren, electric shop; Betty Kelley, Navy warehouse; Alma Woolridge, copper shop; Dorothy Schnellhardt, copper shop. Second row: Evelyn Everett, electric shop; Joanie Swift, electric warehouse; Irene Erickson, electric shop; Louise Erickson, warehouse; Wilma Jacobsen, machine shop tool room. Third row: Marge Dotts, copper shop; Lois Simon, Navy warehouse; Amanda Duffy, Navy warehouse; Gladys Roeder, tool room; Martine Loomer, copper shop.

Lois’s name and job had been circled and an arrow had been drawn to her head in the photo.

Hi! Surprise! We’ve moved down to Groton and yours truly is now a Rosie! Can you believe it? I was scared at first but I’m really getting the hang of things and making new friends. I’m making thirty-five dollars a week! And I’m saving nearly everything, what with the rationing anyway. I’ve been pitching in at the USO, too. I haven’t got a minute to myself, it seems. I’m also plane spotting. Can you believe it? Naomi and I sit there with our little radio and work the graveyard shift Tuesdays and Saturdays. We haven’t seen too many planes. I keep waiting to see your B-17F. With its distinctive tail assembly I can tell it from a B-24 or B-25, so I’ll know it when I see it.

Everyone here is following the war the best they can. The newspapers leave so much out. I guess they have to. It sounds like things are really starting to go well for the Air Corps. Even though I know how terrible this war is, there is such an excitement in the air! I lie on my bed after a fourteen-hour day and I look over at my old Sonja Henie doll and I feel like it must have been a thousand years ago.

Bryant stroked the page with some fondness, trying to put a finger on a certain part of her.

Some of the servicemen throw notes out of the train windows or leave notes near the coffee machines at the USO. They’re not mash notes or anything; they say things like “Girls please write,” and then the name and address. I’ve starting writing a few — one in Fort Ord, California — and they’ve been perfect gentlemen. One even wished you all the luck in the world.

That’s all for now. I’m so tired my hand is wiggling. I miss you. Write when you are able.

All my love,

Lois.

“Let’s go, spruce up,” Gabriel told him. “The crew of Paper Doll is going to be interviewed by Impact magazine.”

Gabriel was circling the base collecting everyone and left Hirsch and Bryant in the day room.

Hirsch winced. “Great title, isn’t it?”

“Don’t wander off,” Gabriel called from the door. “And try not to have something hanging out of your nose when the guy’s talking to you.”

They sat down opposite one another. The silence was awkward. Bryant had an impulse to talk about the night before at The Hoops but stopped himself.

Hirsch pulled over the current copy of Impact and leafed through it. “‘11th AF Reconnoiters, Bombs, Strafes in Attu Action,’” he read. He showed Bryant the photo, a double-pager displaying nothing but snow-covered mountains with unappetizing black rock showing through on the slopes.

“What’re we looking at?” Bryant asked.

Hirsch leaned closer. “‘Reconnaissance photo located position of a unit of our scouts (see arrow) which came overland from Blind Cove on May 11.’”

He pointed to the arrow, which indicated a white expanse.

Bryant peered closely at it. “Those are the scouts, huh?”

“‘They were to join the attack at Massacre Bay, but are shown here turning left too soon.’”

“I’ll say,” Bryant said.

Hirsch sat back, bored. “Maybe they’re tunneling,” he said.

Bryant sneezed. “I guess they’re attacking that white area over there,” he said.

Hirsch shrugged. “Or this white area over here.” He shook his head. “Imagine fighting in a place like that?”

They nodded soberly together at their good fortune.

Hirsch ran a fingertip lightly back and forth over his eyebrow, an unobtrusive nervous habit. “‘Sousse Study Shows What Bombs Accomplish,’” he read.

Bryant waited. “What’s that?” he finally said.

Hirsch read silently for a moment. Then he said, “I guess we just captured this, and now they’re looking at what our bombing really did, instead of just high-altitude photo interpretation.”

Bryant brought his chair around and together they studied the photos. The images were largely unintelligible and they relied on the captions.

Damage to 300-400-ton ship is confined to bridge superstructure, one read.

Bomb damage negligible but a direct hit on the starboard side of this ship aft of the funnel set fire to its oil cargo. Bulkhead prevented flooding. Rudder and propellers were undamaged.

Crater 6 × 30 ft. caused by direct hit on this phosphates shed. The roof is out but note there is no damage to the concrete kiln walls.

Hirsch rubbed his chin. “Encouraging, isn’t it?”

“Well, they’re not hiding anything,” Bryant said. “I guess you could look at it that way.”

Lewis poked his head in, hesitated, and then came over to the table and sat down. “Gabriel said everyone was here,” he complained. He took the Impact from Hirsch and paged back and forth through it. “Who reads this rag?” he asked.

He held up for Bryant a photo of a dorsal turret with its front Plexiglas panel blown out. “How much you think they found of him?” Lewis asked. Bryant smiled, some pressure low in his throat. Lewis pointed to another photo, a B-17 with its entire nose missing.

“Flak,” he said. “No more Eddy. No more Hirsch. And we come home with a six-hundred-mile-an-hour slipstream through the plane. Gabriel and Cooper’s toes are like little rows of ice cubes.”

“Any tail pictures like that?” Hirsch asked.

“None,” Lewis said. “Hey, here’s a shot of Rabbi Rascal on her bombing run.”

“You know, you haven’t quite made being an asshole an art,” Hirsch said. “But I got to admire your dedication.”

“Hey, fuck you, pal,” Lewis said.

Hirsch was quiet, apparently considering the best way to respond. He was not one of the crew’s more aggressive second lieutenants.

“‘They Live to Fight Another Day Despite Damage,’” Lewis read.

“I guess the ‘They’ means the planes,” Bryant said.

“‘Rugged airframes can take it,’” Lewis continued, “‘because of special triple support construction.’” He held up a pencil. “Here’s your triple support construction,” he said. “Plane.” He indicated the pencil. He held up his other hand beside it, and made a rapid series of fists. “Flak,” he said. He brought the two together, and broke the pencil.

“Knock it off,” Hirsch said.

Lewis flopped the magazine in his direction and Hirsch looked at him malevolently.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” Lewis said. “Fucking ninety-day-wonder Jew second looey.”

Hirsch got up and left.

Bryant pulled the magazine over and read silently while they sat and waited, not talking. Lewis drummed “Sing Sing Sing” on the table with his palms.

Gabriel came in with a sloppy and overweight captain and Bean, Snowberry, Cooper, and Eddy in tow. “This is Captain Ciervanski,” he announced. “I trust you’ll give him your full cooperation.”

Captain Ciervanski set a pad and some sharpened pencils down neatly on the table. He wished them a good afternoon.

“No one’s seen Ball or Piacenti?” Gabriel asked glumly. Bryant shook his head. “Now where’s Hirsch?”

“He said he didn’t want any part of this, sir,” Lewis said. “He said he didn’t care what you thought.”

“That’s not really true,” Bryant said.

“Well, we’ll go on with what we have here,” Captain Ciervanski said crisply.

“Sir?” Lewis said. “I didn’t know Impact did interviews.”

“They don’t,” Ciervanski said. “There’s no guarantee this’ll run, either. It’s a pet idea of mine. It’s really up to you guys.”

Snowberry gave Bryant an exaggerated shrug. He was Paper Doll’s lowest-ranking crew member, a tech three, so it wasn’t his place to comment.

“It’s a good idea, sir,” Cooper said. He so rarely spoke, the rest of the crew assumed in this case he was sucking up to Gabriel. “I think they think back home that guys like Clark Gable are flying the Forts.”

“Clark Gable is flying Forts,” Lewis said. “He’s in the 351st.”

“Imagine if they knew back home that we were in charge of things?” Snowberry said.

Ciervanski made a show of getting ready, waiting for them to quiet down or for Gabriel to bring them into line. Bryant tried to help. He liked Ciervanski, though they were expected to display a certain distaste for officers.

“I heard from a guy in the 351st that Gable is actually a good officer,” Willis Eddy said. “Though he don’t actually fly the Forts.”

“I heard that,” Cooper agreed.

“Which one of you is the youngest?” Ciervanski said. He had apparently given up waiting for Gabriel.

“Snowberry,” Gabriel said.

Ciervanski wrote that down. “How old are you?”

“Ah, eighteen,” Snowberry said.

“He looks very young for his age,” Gabriel said. When Ciervanski looked at him, he nodded helpfully.

“He has a twin brother who’s much younger,” Lewis added.

Ciervanski scribbled something down and smiled to let them know he was in on the joke. He went on writing.

“Whaddaya want to know?” Snowberry asked. There was a hint of anxiety in his voice — Bryant imagined him envisioning the headline Underage Gunner Wants to Be in the Fight—and he raised up a bit in his seat to try and decipher what the captain was writing. “I was born in August nineteen-twenty-something,” he said.

Ciervanski asked if his parents were proud of him.

“My dad’s dead,” Snowberry said. “My mom is, I guess.”

The captain scribbled, dissatisfied. “Let me open this up to all the guys,” he said. “You boys’re just starting out. First real rugged mission recently. How’d it strike you? What’re your feelings about combat? What sort of advice would you pass on to green crews?”

They were silent. Gabriel looked at each of them, trying to force an answer.

“I don’t think we’re ready to be giving advice, sir,” Lewis said quietly.

Ciervanski nodded. They could see in his expression the dawning and dismal sense that his pet project might have to be scrapped, or at the very least carried through with another crew. He tried again.

“Are there any outstanding incidents you’d relate?”

“Outstanding incidents,” Eddy mused. “Well, once I saw an Arab eat a sandwich made of K rations and shaving cream.”

Ciervanski closed his pad, and laughed, which relieved them. “Well, Lieutenant, your boys may be ready for Fred Allen but I’m not sure they’re ready for Impact. It’s like trying to interview the Ritz Brothers.”

Gabriel got up from his chair. His face indicated his understanding that his chance to be the skipper of a more famous aircrew was slipping away. He gestured at Lewis. “I think the men are a little, you know, hesitant, sir, and don’t want to blow their own horn. Sergeant Peeters here took a 20mm incendiary in the chest, in the flak vest, on the last raid, and lived to tell about it.”

Ciervanski looked at him sadly, as if he had offered a bowel movement as news. “All right,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

Lewis related the incident with no elaboration.

Ciervanski wrote it all down dutifully. “We’ll get a shot maybe of you wearing the vest and holding the shell,” he said without enthusiasm.

He dismissed them soon after. There had been further silences, additional forlorn questions, spartan answers. Gabriel apologized for all of them. Ciervanski waved off the apology gracefully and said, “Maybe it’s tough getting everybody together like this. Bad idea. Tell you what, Lieutenant. I’ve still got an hour and a half. What do you say I wander around with some of the men in smaller groups and talk to them informally?”

So he ended up with Lewis and Bryant under the nose of Paper Doll. Lewis was explaining what he believed to be the weak areas of the Fortress’s defensive fire umbrella. Gabriel drifted by in the background, keeping a helpless eye on them, worried, Bryant knew, that Ciervanski was talking to exactly the wrong person.

“Who’s that?” Ciervanski asked, pointing to the Plexiglas nose. “Last-minute replacement?” He chuckled. Audie was sitting upright in the bombardier’s seat. Her nose misted the Plexiglas, and her blind and patient lack of comprehension parodied the burned-out look of twenty-mission bombardiers.

Ciervanski offered around cigarettes and then Oh Henry!s. “Look, boys,” he said. “I figure the only way this job could do anything more than keep me busy, do anything for anyone at all, is if I try to get the real story out.”

Lewis and Bryant pondered that. Above them Audie seemed to be surveying the airfield, chin and tongue bobbing lazily to the rhythm of her panting.

Ciervanski sighed. “Well, I humped all the way out here, talked my CO into this idea in the first place, and chewed up a day and a half on this project. I think when I file this the cream chipped beef is going to hit the fan.”

“It may just be us,” Bryant suggested.

Ciervanski stood and brushed off the seat of his pants. His belly shook and he puffed. “You boys take care,” he said. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” Gabriel had seen the leave-taking and was heading their way. “Here comes your lieutenant,” he said. “I gotta break the news to him that you guys won’t be famous this year.”

“I think he already knows, sir,” Lewis said.

Bryant’s father worked for the railroad, and had been able to keep his job through the Depression. He didn’t share much with Bryant and one Christmas told him, That’s all you get; and that’s about right.

Once in a while they went hunting in the woods of eastern Connecticut, a biographical detail Bryant could never bring himself to reveal to Lewis. He was never allowed to handle the gun, his father tramping along with the.22 in the crook of his arm, oblivious to the clouds of insects which drove his son into a quiet frenzy of waving and slapping. His father was a poor shot as well, always sending squirrels and opossum skittering out of range with his first attempt. One of the dogs, Toby, or Corky, or the malevolent Snapper, would come along, adding to his father’s frustration and Bryant’s misery. The one time Tippi, Bobby’s favorite, had come, the dog had performed so miserably — not seeing a squirrel it almost tripped over, even after his father had taken the dog’s head and oriented it in the right direction — that his father had dragged it back to the car and locked it in for the rest of the day, and Bryant had walked and walked thinking of poor Tippi, shamefaced and only half understanding, gazing out behind the windshield after them into the woods.

When Snowberry felt particularly low he liked to, as he put it, swap dad stories. He said he missed his dad a good bunch. Bryant did, too, he was surprised to discover, though he felt bad he had few stories such as Snowberry seemed able to draw on endlessly, stories of dads and kids having fun. He treated it as a failure of memory when he could and chastised himself for not holding close to the best things now that he was away from home.

“I wish my dad were still around,” Snowberry said. “It’s tough when you don’t have a pop.”

Bryant agreed it must be. They talked about the World’s Fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere, the Helicline. All the razzmatazz, Snowberry said, all the really wild stuff about how great things were going to be. Snowberry had gone with his father twice; Bryant had visited once on the train with his uncle Tom, the military enthusiast. His uncle had hectored him throughout the trip about the importance of what they were viewing until Bryant had begun to view the whole thing as pretty much ruined.

Everything is progressing, his uncle had said, more than once. The world was better in every possible way than it was before, and that was something to think about. They had seen the GM Futurama three times, despite the lines and the heat. Bryant had hoarded money his mother had slipped him — his father had suggested to his uncle that they were there to see the exhibits, not to fill up on junk — and he remembered budgeting his time between ice creams more vividly than the exhibits, even the Futurama, with its vast plains and miniature cities explained endlessly by a voice annoyingly like his uncle’s. They had to get ready for the future, his uncle and the voice told him, find their skill, find their place, because the future was where they were going to spend the rest of the lives. It had seemed to him plausible as wisdom until he had thought about it at greater length, at home, and then he had become annoyed at the obviousness of it.

The World’s Fair had frightened him, with its armies of everyone excelling or about to excel, with its talk of a future which seemed so briskly progressive that he’d only be afforded minutes to find and fill his niche and hours to prove himself within it. He had paid close attention to the aviation exhibits, but had absorbed nothing, really, and was wretchedly certain on that long ride back home that he had no aptitude for it, no aptitude for the future, no place in the World of Tomorrow.

The immensity of his presumption, he remembered, had haunted him on that train as it had trundled through Stamford, Bridgeport, New Haven: fly an airplane! Bobby Bryant bringing in the mail through the winter storms of the Sierras; Bobby Bryant barnstorming to beat the band. Could he really take these huge metal machines off the ground and return them as gracefully as falling sheets of paper? His only comfort, when his fears called his dreams to account, was that he didn’t really see how anyone did it.

He’d developed the courage to mention it once, on a family outing his father had granted his mother. His mother had packed sliced celery and fresh pea pods wrapped in foil, wedges of baloney in waxed paper, and his father’s big canteen filled with iced tea, the bags still floating darkly in the cool interior.

They had spread a blanket on a grassy area of Voluntown State Park a short distance into eastern Connecticut, having borrowed his uncle Tom’s Ford for the trip. His mother had spread the food out with some joy and his father poured tea into a collapsible cup already sweating with condensation, and gazed at Amy’s gingham animal as if clearly not recognizing it but feeling that he should. He was ill at ease on the blanket and wore a T-shirt and black pants belted high on his stomach. Bobby drank the tea and rolled the glass on his forehead. His father after eating had wandered off for a look-see and Bryant had followed. He’d caught up to him standing ankle deep in a pond below a rock fall, in shade deep and cool as his grandmother’s sitting room. His father’s pants were rolled to the knees, and his legs sloshed gently back and forth in place. Bryant had slipped off his shoes in the hush and edged in, through a stream sheeting water quietly down a rocky grade, the water cold as bone. His feet were prominent and unreal in the lucidity of the water. Bits of glass blinked sunlight back at him from the bottom. He was about to mention the glass in warning when his father quieted him with a hand motion and pointed. Four fish had glided to a stop just next to his ankle, their tails slowly waving like underwater pennants.

Back at the blanket Bryant had been encouraged enough to bring up someone’s recent round-the-world flight, and his mother had commented politely that it was quite a feat, though his father had remained noncommittal.

“I’m going to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps,” he finally said. His tone struck him as somewhere between forceful and pitiful. He had considered mentioning the RAF but had quailed at the last moment.

His father had seemed preoccupied with a nearby pine. “Isn’t that very dangerous?” his mother asked vaguely.

If talk was money, his father had finally said, brushing those black pants with exaggerated care, he supposed they’d all be millionaires by now.

“We had a game,” Snowberry said, dreamily, “a game we used to play when we were kids. Mel and I. Mel was a year older. He’s in the Navy now, in the Pacific. We were just kids. There was a rope swing with a heavy wooden seat, weathered so that it was that gray color wood gets. We found out if we lay down underneath it, it cleared our noses and faces by just a few inches. And I would lie there and Mel would swing, or Mel would lie there and I would swing, and you’d look up at the clouds and leaves and branches and hear it coming and have to look and it would be by, so fast, so close, you couldn’t believe it, each time. At the top of the swing it was miles away, and then it was back over you, the grain of the wood whooshing by, and you thought, if I lift my head, imagine. And you felt the dirt scuffed floury by all those kids’ feet and the ragged dry grass and the sun and the rush of air from the long swoop of that swing.

“We always went back,” Snowberry said, “even when the ropes were frayed, even when the wood seat split.”

During the next few days they were favored with an unexpected guaranteed shutdown — so much for Stormy’s highs and lows, at least for the time being — and Snowberry had somehow obtained authorization for a base party for the village children. Naturally, the children would need to be accompanied, perhaps by unattached village girls. Knowing it was a squadron tradition, Snowberry had suggested a Christmas party. When reminded that it was nearly August, he let on that he knew, but that they needed cheering up.

They’d been able to contact Jean and Robin on the base phone, a lonely and listing booth near the picket post, and both had agreed to come, their voices reflecting first their hesitancy as to how they were to get there and then their amazement at how quickly things happened with Americans. They were running trucks into the surrounding villages, Bryant explained, so it was really just a matter of being there when the trucks showed up and hopping on board. He suggested, at Piacenti’s urging from behind him in line at the booth, that she bring friends as well.

After the empty trucks had rolled out to cheers and hoots, the squadron gathered for the pre-mission briefing in one of the huts. The men sat and squatted in rows. Snowberry had pinned a blanket up on the board and had tied rope running away from it in a parody of the red mission yarn and mission board. The rope ran off the board, down the floor, and partially up another wall. Lewis, as the CO, told them with exaggerated sobriety that they had a long one today, and then swayed a bit, slopping something out of a sawed-off can. It spattered on his shoes to much applause. Snowberry played the intelligence officer, and he unveiled maps of a dance floor and the female body. He diagramed the mission route to whoops and concerted foot stamping, and outlined the expected resistance. There would be losses, he assured them. He wasn’t going to stand up there and lie. But some of the men would get through.

The men roared. Eddy, who had been drinking since the announcement of guaranteed stand-down, curled forward out of his chair with a crash, and passed out.

“What about flak?” someone called.

The flak was supposed to be very heavy, Snowberry told them. The clap was supposed to be light.

“Remember, men, when you’re protecting yourself, you’re protecting your country,” Lewis said. He slurped from his can.

Snowberry was waiting for attention. “You gunners,” he was saying. “We need to stress again our desire for accuracy and efficiency.” With a flourish he pulled a canvas from the blackboard and revealed a large male organ he’d painstakingly drawn in chalk. Bean cupped his forehead with his hand and Bryant couldn’t help laughing. “Now, to illustrate,” Snowberry said, “I’ve diagramed my own situation, much reduced in scale, of course …”

“Jeez,” Bean said, when the room had calmed down, “I thought this party was supposed to be for the kids.”

“Aw it is,” Piacenti said from behind them. He jabbed a thumb toward the front of the room. “They’re having fun, aren’t they?”

Lewis was sitting on the floor with his legs spread, banging his can between them. “He’s squiffed,” Piacenti said. “Bosto. Plastered.” Lewis acknowledged the diagnosis and waved.

They laid in large wooden cases of soda in tall unlabeled bottles and piled up a stash of everyone’s candy rations, for the kids to take home with them at the end. The party briefing had broken up at 1400 hours with Lewis and Eddy and three quarters of the crew of I’se a Muggin’ incapacitated. Snowberry had been fine after throwing up, and was helping with the setups, subdued by the time the first trucks loaded with silent and excited children came rolling in. He had even managed to dig up the Wing’s Santa Claus suit, and was wearing it when the first of the children filed into the main hangar they were using for the party.

One of the youngest boys gaped at the five foot, five inch skinny Santa. “Father Christmas?” he asked dubiously.

“You got it right on the noggin, kid,” Snowberry said, bustling by with two stacked cases of soda. “Ho ho ho.”

Bryant helped Hirsch and another guy with the doughnuts and sandwiches the mess had sent over. “We oughta give out the powdered eggs at these things,” the other guy said. “The Alliance’d be over tomorrow.”

Two little girls in identical gray cotton blouses with rounded collars flanked Bean, who was reading to them from a picture book. “Go slow, Bean,” Piacenti called. “And let them help with the big words.”

There was a small pile of fruit on the table as well, and a tech sergeant from Seraphim was holding a tiny boy up so he could see, the boy reaching in wonder for the pile. Bryant set another doughnut tray on the table. “He’s never seen an orange,” the sergeant said. “Imagine that?” He had handed the undersized fruit to the boy, who was turning it over in his hands.

Bryant felt a tugging at his sleeve and turned to find Colin and another young boy. Colin was wearing a brown jacket with wide lapels and a dark blue tie. The other boy had no tie and a worn and spotless shirt buttoned with such zeal it appeared to be actively choking him.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Colin said. “Have we surprised you?”

“No,” Bryant said. “This whole thing was just so you could visit.” They stood with each other for a moment while Bryant wondered what to do to amuse two little boys. “Have you had anything?” he asked. “We have soda and doughnuts.”

The boys thanked him and Colin indicated they’d get something soon.

Bryant had an inspiration. He led the two of them to the end of the hangar where canvas had been slung over four engines waiting to be overhauled. A small squad of boys and girls followed, but the crew chief in charge hustled over, puffing and shaking his head, before they could get too close, and said, “No soap, kids. Can’t touch. Leave the tools alone.”

The children seemed unfazed, awestruck simply by the huge canvas shapes. Enough had gathered to make it appear that Bryant was preparing to give a speech.

“Jack-a-mighty, forget security here,” the crew chief said within earshot, perhaps even directing the comment at him. “Back in the States we used to say even the lice had to show ID.”

Robin was beside him, smiling, and nodded that he should go on with what he was doing. She always touched him that way, lightly, on the shoulder, as if to indicate a subtle favoring of him. He gave her a hug, her skin cool and smooth against his cheek. Colin looked on without approval or disapproval.

“God,” he said. “You look great.”

“Thank you,” she said. She was wearing an enormous red floral scarf and a white blouse. “I hope it’s sufficiently in the spirit of Christmas.”

“It’s great to see you,” he went on, searching for something useful to say. “Did you come with Jean?”

She nodded. Jean was with Snowberry at the other end of the hangar, leaning down with her hands on her thighs to talk with a little girl. Snowberry was providing the entertainment, having segued from “The White Cliffs of Dover” to “White Christmas.”

“I must say Jean’s a bit puzzled by this passion Gordon has concerning Bing Crosby,” Robin said. “She says he’ll just break into song, at any moment.”

“He thinks he sings like Bing,” Bryant explained. “We tell him he sings like Hope.”

They gathered into the rough semicircle surrounding Snowberry. He was up on a canvas-covered crate festooned with smallish branches painted red and olive green. “But it isn’t Christmastime,” one small boy blurted. Snowberry winked and swung into the second chorus and began affecting Crosby’s sleepy eyes.

Lewis walked by and nodded, wincing as if in constant pain.

“You remember Sergeant Peeters,” Bryant said.

Lewis placed a finger to his lips and extended a hand to Robin. “Lewis,” he said.

“Oh yes,” Robin said apprehensively. “Hello, Lewis.”

“Hope you’re enjoying the show.”

“I am.” Robin lifted her hand from his. “Thank you.”

“Well, he sounds more like Crosby than Kate Smith,” Lewis conceded. “I’m not big on the Groaner. If they ever change the color of Christmas, he’s through. Who’s the kid?” he added. “Looks like Ned Sparks.”

Colin was back. “Hello, Sergeant,” he said.

“How you doin’, kid,” Lewis said.

“Are you a bombardier?” Colin stood straight, arms at his sides.

“Kids.” Lewis pressed his fingertips to the sides of his head. “Uncle Lewis has a hangover. We don’t want to scream at Uncle Lewis.”

“I’m very sorry,” Colin said.

“Uncle Lewis was stinkeroo a few hours ago,” Bryant explained.

“I’m sorry,” Colin said again. “I’m sorry you’ve been stinkeroo.”

Lewis winced, rubbing slowly in tiny circles. “The kid’s great,” he said.

Snowberry finished his program with a spirited whistling rendition of Al Jolson’s “Toot Toot Tootsie,” and the children and village girls applauded enthusiastically.

An Irish staff sergeant from Geezil II stood up and started on the “Indian Love Call.”

“What is this, Talent Night?” Snowberry said. “Siddown.”

He announced the conclusion of the cultural part of the program — on quite a high note, he felt compelled to add — and set about accepting entries for what he called the Derby, pulling a blackboard over and starting two columns, Rider and Mount. He began the Mount column with his own name, and climbed off the crate to circulate among the children in search of a rider.

“What is it?” Robin asked.

“We race on our hands and knees with the kids on our backs,” Bryant said. “And if I know Gordon, he’ll lay out a doozy of a track.”

The children milled around chaotically and pairs of names were going up on the board. “How about it, Colin?” Bryant said. “Ready to bring home the Cup?”

“No thank you, Sergeant,” Colin said. “But my friend Keir might enjoy it.”

Bryant smiled down at the little boy. “Any gum, chum?” he asked. When Keir didn’t respond, he added doubtfully, “Is Keir old enough?” He visualized trying to explain a fall to a mother who had never liked Yanks in the first place.

Once the question registered, Keir nodded.

Snowberry laid out the route and they lined up twelve abreast. A wide lane was cleared of everything but grease and oil spots, some of which were clearly considerable enough to play a role. They were to race down to the Wright Cyclones under the canvas and back. To minimize trampling, when riders fell they were out of the race. Bryant instructed Keir to hold on around his neck and lie low and the boy took his advice with ferocious concentration, digging eager fingers into Bryant’s windpipe. He was sandwiched between Snowberry, still in the Santa suit, and Hirsch. Piacenti, also representing Paper Doll, was at the other end of the line.

Lewis had volunteered to call the start. Snowberry whinnied and snorted impatiently, and his rider giggled with delight. After several intentional false starts Lewis cried “Bang!” and they were off in a tumbling rush, Bryant feeling the shocks in his arms as he jounced forward. There was a good deal of shouldering and the riders shrieked happily as the mounts falling behind grabbed the feet or calves of those ahead and were kicked in retaliation. Snowberry elbowed Bryant and took a big lead heading into the wide curve around the engines, splaying maniacally through the turn like a crab. Bryant accelerated on skinned knees and palms and lowered a shoulder into the turning Snowberry and caught him broadside, both riders screaming and laughing, and Snowberry crashed into the gallery lining the racetrack and only kept his balance by knocking over two girls and a gunner drinking soda who’d been facing the other way. The boy flew off his back but kept hold on his neck, and Snowberry came after him furiously, pawing the ground and gobbling distance while the boy clung to his neck like an absurd version of a weight handicap and tried desperately to regain his footing and climb back on.

Bryant called No fair! No fair! He’s off! but Snowberry was covering ground like Man O’ War, the boy by now more or less back in the saddle. Ahead of them Hirsch hit a grease slick with both palms and skidded flat out on his chest before tumbling his rider off to the side, and someone ahead of him crossed the finish line. With Snowberry almost on top of him, Bryant gave it a last burst of acceleration looking for Place or Show, but Snowberry dove in frustration and caught him around the thighs, spilling the four of them like colliding skaters short of the finish line.

Robin and Jean helped collect the wounded and dispense Cokes.

“You were marvelous, darling,” Jean said, helping Snowberry brush off his Santa suit. His knees were black with grease. She wore her red hair swept up on both sides and her skin seemed thick, like rind. “I thought the way you stood up to this bully was simply wonderful.”

Snowberry brushed his chin with the back of his hand and scowled in Hollywood pain. “The story you’ve just seen,” he said, “and the characters in it, are fictional. But acts of courage such as these are occurring day after day, in Europe and the Pacific, as Allied fighting men and women stand tall against aggression wherever it’s found and refuse to say Uncle. Or even meet Uncle. Without their noble inspiration, something somewhere would have been impossible—”

“Such a cynic,” Robin scolded. “And hardly old enough to know the meaning of the word.”

“I know what it means, Mrs. Weisenheimer,” he said. “It means someone who can tell the future.”

Audie was cruising the food tables and thumping into the legs consistently, unaccustomed to the new arrangement. She was pulling in a great deal of attention and very little food from the children. She sat and begged from Lewis until Lewis found an egg of unknown antiquity in the bottom of the box sent over from the mess and cracked it over the dog’s head. Audie sat unaffected at first, her cloudy eyes like the portraits of Lee or Stonewall Jackson, while the albumen slid mercury-like from the crown of her head. The children loved it. Bryant always found the dog’s foolish and inappropriate dignity heartening.

“What kind of person humiliates blind animals for sport?” Robin wondered.

“Tail gunners from Dayton, Ohio, I’d guess,” Snowberry suggested. “Who’ve reenlisted.”

Another game evolved while they looked on, a guessing game which evoked great shouts and un-English arguing from the children.

“It was really very sweet of you to do this,” Robin said.

“It was Gordon’s idea, the whole thing,” Bryant said.

“They know,” Snowberry said. “I told them.”

Jean kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It means so much to the children. I think they see you as superheroes.”

“Not a view to which their parents always subscribe,” Robin said.

The party was breaking up. They joined the others to help with the distribution of candy and paper squadron patches.

Snowberry handed a patch with a double candy ration to Colin and heaped a banana on the pile in his hands. Colin thanked him so profusely he turned away, reddening.

Bryant loaded Keir up. The boy seemed dazed and his grip unreliable, so Bryant put the patch and the Baby Ruths in his pockets and let him hold the fruit. He thanked them in a small voice and Robin asked, leaning over him, what he liked best. “Juice from home,” he said.

The children were then piled back into the trucks, clutching their loot as though they expected all of this to be rescinded at any moment. Robin and Jean’s truck was among the last to leave, and they waved once and disappeared into the interior. The men lingered over clean-up and Bryant took a bucket of water to Audie, who had found a quiet corner and was lapping up some spilled soda she’d nosed out. Hirsch held her collar while Bryant scrubbed. She lowered her head helplessly and submitted, quivering in expectation of further indignities, while Bryant thought of the children’s faces.

They endured ground training sessions that were time-filling and redundant. They were mustered out in front of the briefing hut in a drizzle to listen to a lecture on behavior while intoxicated, relations with the locals, and incidents of petty theft. They went back over aircraft recognition, this time with a glum Bean singled out to hold small wooden models at various distances from those being tested. It was especially galling to Lewis that they were still studying aircraft recognition — his suggested technique was to shoot out of the sky anything which wasn’t a B-17 that approached within range — and not working on aerial gunnery, or on tightening the combat boxes. The Ju88 ambush on the return flight from Hamburg had spooked the brass, though, so they were back to naming silhouettes in the dark. One of the lowest percentile scores came on what turned out to be a Ju88. The irony put them in a horrible mood.

At the third session a fight broke out between a tail gunner and a dorsal gunner over the real Ju88’s — over who should have spotted them first — and the tail gunner, a medium-sized tech sergeant from Peoria named Theobald, knocked out a couple of the teeth of the dorsal gunner. The dorsal gunner had gone down on one knee beside Bryant and Lewis, cupping his mouth with trembling care, and when the lights had been switched on, Bryant had been arrested by the two teeth on his desk top like irregular pearls, dotted with jewel-like blood.

They snoozed through an early morning session on hygiene (“Hygiene,” Lewis exclaimed when he saw the topic posted. “Bean picks his nose and eats it”) and tried intermittently to concentrate on an afternoon marathon having to do with ditching in the water.

The first image which came up on the overhead projector once the room was darkened was that of an entire 17 crew minus pilot and co-pilot crammed into the radio compartment, body to body, in crash position. The presentation was clearly out of sequence, and the image faded from the screen.

“Fairies!” someone shouted triumphantly. The tail, ball, and waist gunners’ crash positions involved lying on their sides chest to back, nut to butt, as Lewis characterized so many military lines, and though the subjects’ arms remained primly at their sides, the crush did make things look comically intimate.

“Is that your hand?” someone else called.

The images reappeared, apparently now correctly ordered. The first sheet read: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A BOMBER IS FORCED DOWN AT SEA.

“Not a very military title,” Snowberry commented, next to Bryant.

They were comforted with the next sheet, a navigator turning rather quickly, Bryant thought, from his station, NAVIGATOR, it said, calculates estimated position, informs radio operator, destroys papers, picks up maps, compass, and celestial equipment, and goes aft to the radio compartment.

The image went dark again and the men groaned. The light came back on and a pair of small and flustered sergeants began working on the machine.

“Get the same guy who fixed the movie projector,” the earlier heckler called. The crews folded their arms and waited with a martyrish patience, griping about the constant snafus and trapped until the whole strip could be shown.

Bean and Snowberry argued about the Conn-Louis fight. Bean had admitted to everyone who would listen that he’d blown “over twenty dollars” on the fluke of Billy’s having “walked into that left in the thirteenth.”

“Two years and this geep is still moaning about it,” Snowberry groaned. “Bryant’s the mick. He’s the one should be yapping.”

“Conn won the fight,” Bean asserted. “He was ahead 7-4-1 on one card coming out for the thirteenth.”

“Yeah but he got knocked out,” Piacenti said. “Lights out. Capisce?”

“Nobody beats Joe Louis,” Snowberry said. “Joe Louis goes bear hunting with a switch.”

An image flashed before them of a bombardier taking aim at his bombsight with his pistol, like a cowboy ruefully dispatching his injured horse, and then it disappeared.

“Twenty dollars,” Bean said miserably. “I never bet money. It was a sure thing.”

“War,” Hirsch said, gazing at the huddled repair attempt going on around the machine, “has got to be one of the most boring of human activities.”

The strip resumed and they quieted down, becoming more than a little interested in ensuring that they knew the ways out of a sinking B-17.

At mess Bryant and Snowberry flanked Bean, and Piacenti sat opposite. “You remind me of Peter Lorre, Bean,” Snowberry said. “Except he has nicer eyes.”

“Why don’t you keep quiet?” Bean asked. “And then I could eat in peace. I’m tired of everyone always picking on me.”

“Cream chipped beef,” Piacenti said grimly. “Don’t you just love cream chipped beef? Me, I could eat it all the time.”

“Why isn’t the food as good as it was in Basic Training?” Snowberry asked. “Why is that?”

No one had any ideas.

“I don’t know,” Bean said, chewing. Every so often one of the beef strips didn’t give up so easily. “I didn’t really have Basic.”

“You didn’t have Basic?”

“No,” Bean said, a little cowed. “I got sent to the wrong post because of a typographical mistake. Me and about ninety other guys. The master sergeant didn’t know what to do with us, since we weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, so he had us on kitchen and latrine detail. We never got Basic, and I know I never complained. One day he took us out into the field and showed us his rifle.”

“Showed you his rifle,” Piacenti said.

“You know, the breech, and loading it, and shouldering it, and all that.”

“Are you telling us you only fired a rifle once?” Piacenti asked.

“Well, we didn’t get to fire it.” Bean took the beef from his mouth and laid it in a strip alongside others next to his plate. “Because then we would have had to use the range and he would have had to explain why and all that.”

“Oh, sure,” Snowberry said.

“Anyway, he put it on our record that we had Basic Training because of that, but I don’t think we did.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Snowberry agreed.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Lewis that story,” Bean said, after they had been silent a moment.

“You don’t have a thing to worry about there,” Bryant said.

On their leave, they hitched a ride with Army Supply as far as a sleepy crossroads Robin had stipulated and jumped down and gave the drivers the high sign. They stood awkwardly in the sun while the trucks labored and clamored down the curving lane like an embodiment of their own awkward intrusion into the countryside. They were both eager and happy, and took turns pushing each other out of the shade of a reedy beech tree. Snowberry compared the wonders of the upcoming trip to the World’s Fair, but Bryant did not carry the joke any farther. They had together that morning gone to the PX and asked the tech sergeant behind the barred window of the pharmacy for boxes of condoms. He had wished them happy flying.

“Aren’t you horny?” Snowberry asked. “I’m horny.”

Bryant blushed and let on as how this was all pretty old stuff as far as he was concerned. He fingered the package in his breast pocket, amazed that all of this was happening to him.

Snowberry pointed at Robin and Jean, pedaling toward them on ancient red bicycles and raising a low cloud of dust incongruous with their pace. “Here’s our World of Tomorrow,” Snowberry joked, and Bryant held up a hand in greeting, like a happy Indian, he thought.

It was the beginning of a forty-eight-hour pass. Snowberry and Bryant, thanks to the largesse of Robin Lea and her mother, Elizabeth, were going to enjoy what was for the aircrews one of the more coveted of the officially sanctioned activities: dinner at an English home. Dinner, short-rationed or not, in a setting in some way certain to relieve the sense of being in the service, and the war.

They hugged formally, the girls leaning forward with a cautious hand on their bicycles. Then they walked back the way the girls had come, slipping into single file when the occasional military transport passed. “Hubba! Hubba!” one dope called from the back of a Willys.

“That really burns me,” Bryant was going to say, but Robin turned to him and smiled, unconcerned.

The sky was blue and clear and free of the sounds of engines. Robin and Jean were politely happy but also a little jittery and hardly overwhelmed and Bryant wondered if they wondered if they’d done the right thing. He tried to exchange worried or even wounded glances with Snowberry, but his buddy was still cocking his head around, taking in the sights.

At the cottage Elizabeth Lea stood shooing geese. She held a hemp doormat at arm’s length and beat it with what looked like a small hoe. She met them at the iron garden gate, repeating their names as she took their hands in a way that was both warm and businesslike, so that Bryant felt both grateful and excluded. She was a thin woman with a posture like a question mark who somehow managed to convey the impression of standing straightbacked with dignity.

There were more, borrowed, bicycles alongside a shed black with creosote — Bryant was heartened to think of the work that must have gone into Robin and Jean’s assembly of four bicycles for the afternoon — and the plan was to drop off their things, and tour the countryside as their first activity. They were to go straight inside, Robin directed, and change into their bathing trunks.

They rode out onto the lane in a shaky cluster, Bryant having all kinds of trouble with his bicycle (“Mine’s defective,” he kept calling, to the girls’ delight), the chain slipping disastrously on the sprocket teeth every few revolutions. He was forced to work twice as hard to keep up, but looked up and beamed sweatily whenever they sent a questioning glance back.

They passed a chemist with a kelly green sign, a baker’s window with golden and glazed buns. The huddled windows and doors and forehead-low roofs all seemed to him vaguely reminiscent of children’s books. They rode through lanes shaded bottle green by overhanging trees, one of which Robin would occasionally single out as particularly old. “She’s showing us trees?” Snowberry said as an aside at one point. Bryant kept his eyes on her back, rising and falling gently with the action of the pedals, damp enough now across the delicate wings of the shoulder blades that her blouse was clinging, and he focused on the simple pleasure he derived from that, as they soared down through curves, passing through shaded breezes that cooled his forehead. The leaves on the trees above them turned with the wind like schools of fish.

At a pleasing wide bend in the river they stopped, and rattled their bikes down a short embankment to the water’s edge. Jean led them further along a path until a crescent of lawn shielded from the road appeared, and there with a sigh she dropped onto the grass two small satchels that had jounced patiently on the bicycle baskets during the ride. They peeled off tops and shorts and settled down to the water and the sun. The undressing seemed illicit and exciting and awkward, though it was all on the up and up.

“This is something,” Bryant enthused. “This is okay.” He gave Robin’s arm a squeeze. He could feel the sun drawing the smell from the damp earth.

“I love hearing men talk. That’s what I miss most,” Jean said. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks were pink in the sun.

Robin murmured something reassuring. Her bare arm indolently extended in his direction. Her eyes were closed and relaxed despite facing the sun and her mouth was slightly open. He guessed she didn’t feel like conversation. From somewhere he caught the faint and pleasant smell of an oxidized apple. Above them the sun shining through some birch leaves gave them the translucence of fresh grapes.

He thought, I could retire to a place like this, and then grimaced. Retire from what? He saw himself a fat hatless old man in shorts, still unable to track a German fighter with a Sperry turret. But it seemed foolish and wasteful worrying while on leave with Robin, and he settled to face the sun. It bloomed a luminous red beneath his closed eyelids.

Now I’m thinking about Lois, he realized morosely.

“It’s very good to see you, Bobby Bryant,” Robin said. She was slowly smoothing her hair back from her ears.

“You look great,” he said. “I’ve been trying to figure out some way of saying it that doesn’t sound sappy.”

She had a winning way of snorting in amusement at herself. “I’m vain, really,” she said. “Comes from my grandmother Janie, I’m told. I’ll tell you about her sometime.”

Bryant didn’t answer. He had the awful feeling at times like this, when he was at a loss for a response, that Robin was inexorably coming to realize that he wasn’t good enough for her.

She got up onto one knee, lifting her hair from the back of her neck, and straightened her arms languidly. “I think I’ll have a paddle,” she said.

At the edge she hunched low and swept water up over her arms and chest, giving a little shake as she did so. He closed his eyes again, and heard the splash of Robin diving in and opened his eyes and immediately she surfaced making crouping sounds. “It’s like ice,” she was finally able to say.

Her mother had dinner ready when they returned. There was a small pewter pot of horseradish on the table as well, which did not seem to be a mistake, though none of the women used it. Snowberry spooned a small portion onto the outside of his plate. While they ate, Elizabeth recounted in some detail her first sighting of Americans.

“One of them gave Mother a flower,” Robin said. “She’s been a supporter of the Yanks ever since. I think he in point of fact gave her one of her own bluebells.”

“Nonscriptus,” Bryant said, remembering Robin’s water-color, and her mother smiled, pleased that this American had a finer side.

The women talked about where rationed commodities were becoming available. They talked about the war in the village. “We had a Wellington crash nearby some months ago, as well,” Robin said. “Near the cottage of an elderly friend. We went straight off to look in on her and we found her drinking port in the front room, with a kettle lid on her head, tied with a regimental tie.”

Bryant laughed in a way he hoped maintained decorum. Snowberry grinned.

“She was ready for another blitz, I suppose,” Elizabeth said.

After a custard made from white powder from a lidded tin, Snowberry held out for nightlife, so they walked the half mile or so through the cool twilight to the local pub. At the door Snowberry pointed up to the overhanging sign, “Ye Silent Woman Pub.” Underneath was carved a decapitated woman. “Very sweet,” Robin said.

They sat around a table and listened for a short while to the patrons. Snowberry cleared his throat and smiled and sat up straighter in the chair. “So what did you girls think of a couple of enlisted men asking you out?” he said.

“I put it down to the immaturity and egotism of youth,” Jean said.

“You know the British attitude towards the Yanks,” Robin said. “Eager blunderers who succeed through sheer weight of numbers.”

Bryant could see Snowberry fingering something in his pants pocket and hoped it wasn’t the condoms. Snowberry said, “So why date us when the RAF is full of Leslie Howards?”

“Well, you’re still to some small degree British,” Robin conceded. “Unruly colonials come over to help. There is that.”

“And of course, you have chocolate,” Jean said. She had large round eyes which frequently lent her expressions a misleading suggestion of credulousness.

“Unruly is right,” Snowberry said with enthusiasm. “The other night you should have seen us. We were at The Hoops and from there we flattened this chemist’s shop. Looked like someone had backed a truck right through it.”

“How does one ruin an entire chemist’s shop?” Robin asked. She did not sound pleased.

“We started early,” Snowberry said. He slugged his beer.

Robin sighed. Jean sipped the beer. At the bar they were arguing about the quality of the whiskey.

“I guess we’re sort of like what you hear about Americans, huh?” Bryant said.

Robin conceded a small smile. “What do the Americans say about us?” she asked. “We’re curious.”

“There’re two theories,” Snowberry said. “One is that English girls are as loose as a goose, and that they’ll say right out what candy or gum’ll get you. The other is that they’re just like any other girls, and that any guy who thinks differently is a sap. Lewis is always saying that.”

“And to which view do you subscribe?” Robin asked.

“I think you’re the berries,” Snowberry said.

“A third theory,” Jean said disparagingly.

Bryant knew the statement to be only half fraudulent: Snowberry was wild about Jean, probably more than he knew, and had been able to keep his feelings fairly discreet, a trick Bryant envied. But he also had quoted theory number one to Bryant more than once, and liked to say concerning Jean’s response to alcohol that after a few drinks the three inhibitions she did have disappeared. The commonly accepted wisdom around the squadron based on both experience and wishful thinking was that if you wore wings, you were halfway home.

“You shouldn’t flatter yourself, Gordon,” Jean said. “We’re here because you’re entertaining, and every bit as generous as you’re hopeful.” Robin laughed. “And”—Jean touched his cheek—“you’re quite handsome, in a younger brother way.”

Snowberry grinned. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“If you ladies are golddiggers, why not officers?” Bryant asked. “Why not Lieutenant Gabriel, or Cooper?” He was secretly afraid of just that: officers with more going for them stealing her away.

“Don’t give them a choice like that,” Snowberry said. “Make it fair. Isn’t Gable an officer?”

“I think you’ve proven quite nicely that enlisted men, with a bit of jerrying around here and there, somehow acquire all the resources available in your Air Corps to officers.”

“I think we ought to put our cards on the table,” Bryant said. “We think you’re the berries, and you think we’re tops, too.”

Robin smiled. She raised her glass, and they toasted the announcement. One by one they fell to gazing at a poster over the door, of a British Tommy charging forward with a disconcerting ferocity. The caption read, He’s Working for You — Are You Working for Him? The poster had evidently been torn in half and reassembled. Robin mentioned the connection with the pub’s sign. They drank more quickly, looking for the most part at each other, anxious to get out from under the influence of the poster.

On the way back to the cottage Jean and Snowberry held hands. Two children were trying to boot apples soccer-style into a pail. A young woman was peering keenly at the action of a hinge as she swung the door this way and that. It occurred to Bryant as he passed through the village that everyday life was the surprise, not the war: the surprise was in the revelation that all of this life would go on, unconcerned, as he and his friends did what they did every day.

He fancied Robin was thinking the same way. Her eyes were following a low stone wall, and she knitted her brows, as if displeased, the way his father did. Ahead of them Snowberry and Jean were evidently discussing Snowberry’s left hand.

“Why don’t I ever fall in love at first sight?” Robin asked. She looked at Bryant, who was unable to shrug or smile. The comment seemed thoughtless and deflating. “I suppose it has something to do with my father,” she added. “I never knew him very well. Mother used to say he treated us badly when he treated us at all.”

“I was never very close to my father, either,” Bryant said. But your father’s still alive, dope, he thought.

“He was killed in a shipping accident. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did.” He wondered what Snowberry and Jean were talking about. “Though that’s all you said.”

She said, “It all sounds so pathetic and commonplace I suppose I don’t often see the point of going into it.”

He groped for something that would help. He wanted to know more about her, but was retaining very little.

She smiled for his benefit. “It’s funny how everyone agrees on the awfulness of growing up, isn’t it?”

He thought he should say something. He remembered Snowberry. “Gordon doesn’t. He’s always telling me these great stories. I always feel like, God, did I miss the boat.”

She gazed ahead sympathetically at Snowberry’s back. “Perhaps he’s forgotten,” she said.

On a low knoll a terrier watched them with the paranoid expression peculiar to the breed. Another dog lay snoozing with its fur poking through the slats of a garden fence, and before arriving at the cottage, he caught a mysterious and fleeting glimpse down a side lane of a small boy in shorts riding a black dog along a winding path beneath silent and dark trees.

Elizabeth had retired, leaving a pot of tea in its quilted warmer and an overlong note on the dining room table. Bryant had the sudden intuition that she’d been given some sort of instructions prior to their visit. Jean and Gordon went out to the garden despite the dark, and Bryant and Robin tidied up at the strange stone sink. He put away in the cream-colored cupboards dishes or utensils that Robin would then quietly relocate. It began to rain, the sound light on the leaves outside the windows. They heard the heavier sound of running footsteps, and Jean swept back in, with Snowberry behind her. She shook out her hair and Snowberry rubbed his shoulders while Robin circled the room turning out the lamps. Robin kissed Bryant’s cheek and Jean kissed Snowberry on the lips and they said goodnight.

“Aw, Jeez,” Snowberry said, shivering a bit for effect.

“Let us know if you need anything,” Jean whispered.

“I need something,” Snowberry said.

“Goodnight,” she said again, and the two girls ascended the stairs. Bryant said goodnight and Robin turned on the landing and hesitated, silhouetted in a nimbus of light in the hallway.

Snowberry climbed the stairs himself soon afterwards, disappointed and tired. “I think we probably do worse with girls than anybody in the Army,” he said as he climbed. Bryant remained in the kitchen, sitting in the dark and listening to the loud ticking of a clock he hadn’t noticed. There was a faint biscuity smell. The rain had stopped and the cardboard blackout shutters rattled faintly against the window frames. In the bathroom he discovered behind the washstand an old corner of National bread, plush with mold. The loo was a separate room altogether, with a long chain hanging down from a flushing tank set up higher than eye level. Bryant assumed it had something to do with gravity. He dreamed that night about a Bing Crosby record with Jesus Christ accompanying on clarinet, and remembered wondering vaguely how sleeping people got their hands on such recordings.

In the morning when he woke no one was in the house, and in the garden Robin was standing quite still, with a hand cupped and raised over her forearm, her face as placid and beautiful in its absorption as the face of a woman in a painting. Only the tremor of background primroses compromised the stillness. The air above the trees rang with a mysterious bird. The short sleeves of her blouse trembled, and she slapped the insect, and broke the spell.

When he joined her, they sat in wicker garden chairs under the cherry tree she had written him about.

“They’ve gone for a walk,” Robin said.

Bryant rubbed his chin. “Were they trying to leave us alone, you think?”

She sniffed. “Jeannie adores the thought of mad, secret lives of endless trysts and intrigue. I suppose I’ve let her down a bit on that score. The silly thing is, Gordon seems to believe he’s initiating things.”

Bryant nodded foolishly, feeling acutely again that he and his friend were overmatched by these women.

An insect thin as a pencil point lighted on his lap. On its back were aqua and scarlet bands as brilliant as fresh paint. An immense white cat perched atop the stone man-hole in the corner of the garden, Cardinal Newman’s hideout. Robin made birdlike squeaks with her pursed lips. “That’s Puff,” she said. “Here, Puff.”

He asked if she’d been doing any more painting.

“Haven’t had much time,” she said. “I’d like to go to art college after the war, I think. I was told by a friend I’d be certain to be offered a place.” She opened her eyes and turned to face him. “Probably end up doing adverts.” Her complexion remained beautifully smooth in the direct sunlight. She seemed pleased by the colors on her arm. She smiled. “What about you, mysterious Bobby? What will you be doing after the war?”

Bryant shrugged. The war had imposed a way of thinking on him, an ability to conceive only in terms of the present. His past was receding, so that calling it forward required ever more effort, and his future was a white wall, bland and abstract enough to discourage speculation.

They had a late dinner, relaxing around a splintery wooden table in the garden with cold meat and pickles. The windows of the cottage filled with the orange and violet of the sunset.

“This is really a beautiful place,” Snowberry said.

“I’d like to have you for two weeks,” Robin murmured.

Jean gave her eye a delicate rub. “Six would do nicely,” she suggested. She crunched a pickle.

Bryant and Snowberry nodded politely.

“You don’t seem particularly enthused,” Robin noted.

They were awkward momentarily, uncertain what she wanted. “This is great, too,” Snowberry said.

“Aren’t you always wishing the war would go away?” Jean said.

They were silent. Snowberry looked to Bryant. “I can’t say that, exactly,” Snowberry said. “There’s a lot I hate about it, a lot that’s terrible. But in some ways I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

The girls looked at them.

“I guess it’s hard to talk about,” Snowberry further volunteered. Bryant felt angry and impatient with the question: they were outside looking in. How could they know?

“I know it sounds terrible,” Snowberry said. “I don’t mean it to.”

After a pause Robin shifted her gaze from Snowberry to Bryant. “And you?” she asked.

“It’s bad. It’s the worst thing in the world,” he said. He wanted to reassure her. He felt the way he had when his mother had discovered him doing something childish and destructive, like vandalizing street signs. He didn’t have the words. “But you know. I met you. I got to know good pals I can depend on. It teaches you stuff like that.”

She sighed. “I suppose we shouldn’t browbeat you so. I suppose we’re just trying to understand.”

The comment let everyone off the hook, and in celebration Snowberry attempted Crosby speaking: “Well now, little miss, that’s the kind of spirit that’ll Back the Attack.”

“Oh you,” Jean said. “It’s like having a boy with a drinking problem.”

“Now the boys ‘n’ me would like to bring you a little ditty—”

Bryant slid a pickle in his mouth. Snowberry did a passable Crosby Choking. The girls applauded.

When it was fully dark, they moved the table inside and Jean and Snowberry played cards while Elizabeth listened to the radio. Robin led him out to Cardinal Newman’s hideout, claiming there was a phosphorescent glow of some sort emanating from deep within which was visible on certain nights. When they had reached the corner of the garden, they walked forward slowly hand in hand, Bryant setting his feet down with edgy heel-to-toe caution. The ground and the air felt damp. Robin said, “Here,” and lowered herself to a crouch and he followed. The earth clearly gave way to a different value of darkness and he could feel and smell the cold cellar air below. His fingertips touched rough stone.

“Do you see it?” Robin whispered.

He considered equivocating and said no.

She leaned back and sighed. “Sometimes it doesn’t light up for visitors.” Her voice was pleasantly sexual in the darkness. “I can’t say I know why.”

He settled onto his knees, and judged by the angle of her silhouette that she was gazing at him. He could smell rich earth, rotting leaves.

“Bobby,” she said.

He leaned forward and kissed her, in the darkness softly catching the corner of her lips and her cheek.

“I don’t seem to like that many boys,” she said. “Mother says I seem to think I’m too good for them.”

He thought, God, I’m some Romeo. She does everything first. She arranged herself so that his chest formed a kind of a chair back for her. “I think often of my grandmother Janie,” she said. “My mother’s stepmother. She grew up on a croft, Laghie, in the north of Scotland. I have a photograph of her, windswept and frightened, on top of a carthorse. She kept illustrations of all the birds in the area, and Mother says my artistic ability came from her.” She rubbed her eye once, carefully, with a fingertip, reminding him of Jean. “She was always said to be very vain, and sad.” Bryant tried to imagine this woman, and saw Robin with her arms folded in a tartan skirt standing in a wagon. “At sixteen she left home and went to Glasgow to train as a nurse. Mother has another snap of her at a cottage hospital. She became engaged to a young man who farmed another croft. Everyone in the family called it a miracle she’d found someone good enough for her. Naturally, he was killed. She never really recovered.” She scraped the edges of the man-hole stone with her fingernail, the tiny scratching audible.

“Eventually, she married my mother’s father, but Mother says she spoke about that farmer to her dying day as though he were just out of town for a bit, as though he’d just stepped out to the pub. In the cottage hospital photo she’s still happy, standing in her stiff white uniform, with such a sad, shy smile. Mother always says, Robin, that’s your picture, Robin, that’s your smile, until I’m so frightened I can’t bear to look at it and have to put it away. The last time I got so cross Mother swore she wouldn’t bring Janie up again.” She shivered, and patted her arms. “I’m frightened for you, Bobby. I’m frightened for me, as well.”

“Don’t be scared,” he said.

“That’s fatuous advice, isn’t it?” she said.

He reached his hand down into the hole. The rock wall was cold and lined with water.

Her face was very near his. “You can’t separate out the fear,” she said. The seriousness of her expression made the possibility of disaster erotic. She kissed him, holding his chin up to hers, with the draft from the hole cooling his legs and feet.

Inside, they curled together into a big wingbacked chair facing the quiet hearth. The arms were doilied where they had gone threadbare. She was wedged in beside him and had her fingers on his throat and her thumb on his collar.

“I was working with the village children,” she said. “Did I tell you? A drawing class. One day as something special I brought in a banana. A friend of a friend of Mother’s had gotten two from a Yank serviceman. You should have seen their eyes. We all said it together: ba-na-na. As if that were a little bit of possessing it. And we all drew it.” He touched the fine hairs on her neck, and she took his hand lightly and sniffed his fingertips. “I knew they all entertained the vague hope that it would be shared, or go to the best drawing. I suddenly had this unpleasant feeling of power. I had intended to take it home, but you should have seen their faces. We cut it into sixteen pieces and ate them in tiny nibbles, as I’ve always imagined one ate caviar.”

She turned his head with the gentle pressure of two fingers on his cheek and kissed him. She took in her breath softly. “I remember being saddened a part of their childhood was missing. Perhaps I thought that was the worst thing about war, the way it robbed childhoods. I remembered at their age trekking home past the shops and windows of iced cakes, iced all with lavenders and pale greens.”

There was a pronounced thump upstairs and then silence. Some board creaking followed. They caught each other gazing upward and smiled.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

Robin leaned her head against the wingback. “I hope Jean’s careful,” she said. “You don’t suppose Gordon would be careful, do you?”

“I don’t suppose so,” he said.

“She’s had hideous luck with men.” She was pressing her thumb into the valleys between his knuckles, one by one.

“You make it sound like a raffle.”

“I suppose it is. The great love of her life was a Wellington gunner from Nottinghamshire. She spent two weekends with him and announced one morning she was PWOP.”

“Pwop,” Bryant said.

“Pregnant without official permission,” she explained. “It’s an RAF term. We used to joke about it, before it happened. He treated her horribly. Said she wasn’t boxing him into anything. Gave her the name of a doctor.”

“And she went?”

“The night before, he stayed over, and that morning, she had difficulty in getting him up. He didn’t say anything, made a packet of tea, and ate cake in front of her. Complaining about a hangover. Completely oblivious.”

Bryant felt bad for her. “What happened?”

She sighed. “He disappeared during what they called a lull in fighter activity. Jean still visits his mum.”

He imagined the two of them chatting quietly before the photo on the mantel, the guy’s home clothes hanging in forlorn rows in the other room.

“I’m sorry.”

“We talk a lot about living for today, and What Might Happen, and everything feels so rationed we don’t want to miss a thing, but we have responsibility, here. We’re dealing with people, and it can be very serious. It is very serious.”

He swallowed and tried to remain still.

“I don’t know what kind of arrangement you have back in the United States with your girl Lois, but I doubt very much it encompasses something like this. You must in some way make clear in your own mind what you think you’re doing.” She stroked his chest, near the breast pocket that held condoms. He swallowed. “You’re no longer another cheery Yank. You’re my Bobby, and that scares me.” She kissed him on the cheek, holding her lips pressed to it. “I haven’t the words,” she whispered, and he felt fear, and responsibility, and excitement. He wondered if in some unguessed-at English way he’d been outmaneuvered or committed himself. She had his face in her hands, and she kissed him, and when he relaxed she closed her eyes.

She went upstairs to send Gordon back to his room when the clock read 3:30 by the light of a kitchen match. Bryant remained in the chair, too excited to sleep, imagining she would come back down in a filmy nightgown and a torrent of emotion. After a few minutes the upstairs fell completely silent, and he lingered unhappily on the prospect that she was still tossing and turning quietly, her resistance breaking down. He dozed eventually and dreamed of Vera Lynn singing to him at a barbecue, and when he awoke, Jean was clinking around the kitchen, making ersatz coffee, and it was cool and light in the living room. He rose stiffly and said hello with a weak smile. “Waiting for Father Christmas?” she asked. She removed the blackout shutters and behind her, when his eyes adjusted, he could see daffodils under the apple trees, the lawn grayed with dew.

“They’re both sleeping,” she said. They sat in silence, Bryant self-consciously attempting to mat down his hair and clear the sleep from his eyes. When the water was ready, she poured the coffee. It smelled like the woods.

“What’s the ditty? ‘Because of Axis trickery, my coffee tastes like chicory,’” she said.

He smiled. “It’s fine.” He was determined not to make some sort of horrible gaffe by referring to her troubles.

She was listening to the morning noises of the cottage. “How long has Gordon been having those dreams?” she asked.

He looked away, embarrassed. “Since a mission we flew a little while ago. He said they were getting better.”

She sniffed skeptically. “I’m happy not to have seen them earlier, in that case.”

“Was he a bother?”

She laughed aloud. “You’re a queer one, Bobby Bryant. I can’t decide whether you’re very nice or very thoughtless. Probably both.”

He was taken aback. “Why do you say that?”

She waved him off, her attention returning to the garden. Puff was hunched near the bluebells.

“Maybe she sees something,” Bryant suggested.

“Her friend’s buried there,” Jean said. “A stray. Passed on in her sleep, very mysterious. We buried her in the garden yesterday morning before you came.”

Puff pawed at the tilled ground. The loose earth popped and trembled.

“Puff isn’t giving up,” Jean said.

The cat dug more frantically. Dirt ridged her forehead, above the eyes.

“Jeez,” Bryant said. “Kind of morbid.”

Puff plunged in and pulled, struggling, and the ground heaved and broke loosely and the weight below came free slightly, a paw showing like a lost mitten. Puff sprinted a foot or so away and turned to watch, coiled. Nothing happened. Puff watched, clumped dirt falling from her head and back like the coating from fried chicken.

Jean watched without expression. Bryant rubbed his nose.

Puff lay in the frosted grass, looking on with complete concentration. They rose finally and went into the garden to retrieve her, scuffing dirt over to rebury the exposed paw. They brought Puff inside and cleaned her with damp soft dress remnants used for rags, and while she lay around licking herself with detachment, the final hour of Bryant’s leave passed with the two of them gazing on the yawning cat in glum silence before going to wake the rest of the house so that the boys could get back to base on time.

They were going on practice missions, the CO told them, and they were going to take them seriously, and if they didn’t take them seriously, they were going to end up dead. Collisions during assembly were becoming all too frequent as larger and larger bombing groups were attempted for the raids. Six aircraft had been lost in other squadrons in the last five days without enemy intervention. Fifty-seven men. Pilot error and insufficient vigilance, especially in poor visibility, were the official culprits. The CO demonstrated with his hands flattened and bobbing closer to one another: heavily laden bombers momentarily unbalanced by turbulence had little room for safe recovery in a tight combat formation. At times single aircraft and even whole formations were becoming lost and crossing into the formations of others in the general pre-dawn chaos. The 341st nearby had had the particularly humiliating distinction of having to abandon a mission altogether.

They were going to work on assembly. The assembly ship was to be the first off the airfield, and would fly to the designated point and begin firing flares. They were to follow at minimum intervals and assemble in formation as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The assembly ship was a battle-weary B-24 called You Can’t Miss It. It was bright yellow with huge red polka dots, and a kelly green tail. The men loved on fairly clear days such as this to fly right up to it and earnestly ask for radio confirmation of its status as assembly ship.

If the balloon didn’t go up in the next few days, the CO continued, they could count on additional gunnery training flights. The standard procedure had been to fly over the British coastal ranges firing away at the targets towed by tired old RAF Bostons. Now that was a job, Lewis said, that had to be the most dangerous in the armed forces, towing those targets while planeloads of ginks and shnooks let fly.

Bomber Command, the CO mentioned with exaggerated care, had reason to believe that the gunnery instructors back in the States had not been as precise in their scoring of cadet shooting as they might have been. The comment got a big roar of laughter from the aircrews. A month earlier in one of those spectacularly embarrassing incidents the Air Corps seemed able to produce every four weeks or so, one of the target-towing Bostons had been shot down. The Brit pilot had hit the silk so angry he had brandished a revolver at the contrite B-17’s that flew past his chute.

Bryant found himself climbing with Paper Doll up through white cumulus clouds and gray sky. Lewis was singing a parody of “Into the Air, Army Airmen” over the interphone: Into the air, Junior Birdman, get your ass into the blue. The plane banked sharply and he knew he was supposed to be remaining vigilant in his lookout for the assembly plane and others, but the view through breaks in the cloud entranced him: visibility distended in a pleasant and sleepy way by a slight haze all the way to the Dutch coast and deep into France, the muted colors receding into the curvature of the earth. The earth closer to home resembled the subdivided palette of Robin’s paintbox. Cooper had switched the crew’s interphone to Liaison, and Bean tuned them into the BBC, and they climbed higher into the great chamber of air above the cloud cover listening to an alto voice singing opera.

Hirsch spotted the assembly plane and within minutes they had slipped into a slot above it and behind Geezil II and Leave Me Home, which had achieved its name by three times developing engine trouble on the transoceanic flight to England and three times having had to turn back.

They found themselves enduring the usual casually harrowing jockeying and shifting in formation as they circled in an ever-growing group, the clouds like shoals beneath them. Bryant could hear the guff Gabriel and Cooper were taking — Close it up! Close up the formation, goddamnit! — from the pilot of the lead plane.

From above and behind, three more 17’s appeared and drifted down to them. Bryant called them in to Gabriel and said aloud, Now where’re they coming from? They eased terrifyingly close and suddenly everyone in Paper Doll was shouting, as if the other crew could hear. Gabriel had no room to maneuver and shouted as much back in response over the interphone when they yelled for evasive action. The closest 17 bobbed higher with an infuriating casualness after having dipped so low that its ball turret had been momentarily level with Bryant in his dorsal. The ball turret gunner had waved.

They had been badly frightened and were glad to be among the first to land, an hour later. They were standing outside of Paper Doll waiting for the jeeps when Lemon Drop came in with a crushed tail from a collision somewhere in the clouds, its engines straining, the emergency trucks clanging, and Lemon Drop swung to the right as it swept in over the tarmac, hesitating with its left wing dipped, and then that wing caught the concrete and the immense plane smashed and concertinaed as they watched, a body cartwheeling out.

The radio operator survived. There was no fire. The plane had shattered into pieces spread over the runway like a junkyard. They had sprinted over to help the emergency crews, and Lewis and Bryant had come across in the cockpit section only the co-pilot’s flying boot, wedged beneath a rudder pedal, a bone jutting up from within like the stalk of an immature flower. When the shock had worn off, Bryant’s first clear thought, lying on his bunk, was that they were all dying like ants, or pets, or foreigners — they were all dying now as part of a routine.

He lay still. When he woke he was damp. The hut was gloomy and he guessed he had missed dinner. Something nearby smelled like aluminum. On the bunk beside him Snowberry lay face into the pillow with his hands hanging together off the edge like a victim of an exotic torture. Lewis was on his own bunk beyond, shifting his rear to test the sounds of various farts. Piacenti sat upright with his legs over the side and his head in his hands. It looked to Bryant like a training film illustration of Low Morale.

“I want to go home,” Snowberry said. His voice came from deep within the pillow.

“For serious drinking the boys had a table the shape of Texas. Cut it out of sheet metal,” Lewis said. He had spent his leave with friends in the 92nd. “We were playing Drink the Cities. We were on Galveston or Houston and somebody said, Toast. There was that point when no one knew what to drink to, and some little gunner who’d had his nose smashed over Aachen said, Yo Momma. It was just right.”

Snowberry had not moved and it looked to Bryant as if he’d stopped breathing. Lewis was chewing on a tightly rolled piece of paper and did not seem to be deriving pleasure from his story. He had a photo of Gene Tierney over his bed, under a handwritten sign that said Do Not Hump, and he was stroking her behind absently with his hand in his flying glove. “Now this may be a bunch of guys who appreciate the grotesque no more than seven seconds running in their whole life. But I swear I do love to see the forces come together.”

“I was figuring it out, on the ride in,” Snowberry said after a silent and dismal pause. “I don’t think we can go to chow anymore without fifteen percent casualties.”

“The last big party we had,” Lewis said, “it was after a big mission. We had WAAF’s and WAAC’s and Red Cross Girls and Wrens and local girls, you know, nice girls, and they were all standing around or sitting in these little groups. We kept thinking, how’d we get so lucky? Why are there so many girls here? Then it hit us: they were all the dates of the missing guys. We’d lost eight planes. Eighty guys. They’re all standing around, all dressed up.”

“Big night for sloppy seconds,” Piacenti said.

“One little girl musta started getting dressed four hours before she came. She was at a table with some other girls and they were ignoring her, you know, trying to at least have a good time. She was crying. I went over and talked to her.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Piacenti said. He believed Lewis to be a real tail hound.

“I told her it was just arithmetic,” Lewis said gently, as if the subject had been inevitable and infinitely dreary. “If each group has to do X number of missions and loses Y number of men with each mission, how soon before all the original men are history?”

“I worry about fire,” Piacenti said. “You know, you’re caught inside and there’s fire.”

Lewis chewed and the paper moved around his mouth like a toothpick. “This guy in the 92nd had this photo of all the squadron Forts lined up the week he’d arrived. He showed it to me? All of them are gone now. None left. You ever wonder why they don’t have battle-weary B-17’s pulling things around?”

He spat the paper high above the bunk in a startling parabola. “It’s simple, Dick Ott used to say. You’re in a game and you need to score twenty-five. Before you run into the Glass Mountain.”

The Glass Mountain was a squadron term for fatal and spectacular disasters in the skies, as in, This or that ship ran into the Glass Mountain. It had to do with the effect achieved when a heavy bomber was hit by flak while flying straight and level.

“Roasting to death,” Piacenti repeated. He shivered, and rubbed his neck. “That’s what really scares me.”

“Think of it like the Brits,” Lewis counseled. “You know. They talk about it like polo or something. These are just the single elimination playoffs.”

“I was talking to Hirsch,” Bryant said. “He was saying nothing was haphazard, you know? and that if you had all the figures, you could have predicted—”

“Everything is haphazard,” Lewis said with vehemence. “You don’t predict nothing. I blow up your house, you tell me which way all the pieces are going to fall.”

“But don’t you think—”

“Shut up,” Lewis said. “You give me a headache. Don’t open your mouth.”

“I want to go home,” Snowberry said into the pillow. “I’m tired of this war.”

There was no response. The principal sound in the metal hut became the squeaking of Piacenti’s bunk as he scratched himself with an annoying industry. Bryant closed his eyes and nursed his humiliation, imagining Lewis gloating, imagining various forms of comeuppance.

Nothing was on for the next day. In the middle of the night he was aware that Snowberry was awake, and when he got up in dull insomniac frustration to go to the can, Snowberry followed. He sat on the can just for a place to sit.

“Some night,” Snowberry said. He ran water on his hands and looked at it.

Bryant was hours past answering. He fancied the water beneath him was rippling quietly in the bowl.

Snowberry produced his little red journal, opening to a marked page. He began reading after settling in with his back to the wall, his lips every so often forming ghostly words. Bryant rose and hoisted his shorts and returned to his bunk.

In the dark, vague shapes telescoped toward and away from him. He followed elusive ribbon-like creatures he hoped were temporary retinal imperfections of some sort until he had to get up, and hissing in frustration he lowered his feet to the floor and padded back to the latrine, concentrating dimly on some notion of a drink of water.

Snowberry was asleep, still seated upright, swaying with tiny starts like a doddering grandfather. Bryant sat beside him and when he didn’t wake extended a finger slowly and touched his nose. He didn’t stir. He waggled his fingers grimly before Snowberry’s face. His journal was opened on his lap. Bryant picked it up and began reading without high hopes. He skipped a section on Frances Langford. The next sections were drafts of letters.

This whole thing has really been something in terms of showing me the world and how different everyone is. Before the service I’d never met anyone from other places and now I know guys from Rhode Island and Ohio, and I’ve met guys from Texas and New Mexico and places like that. I always think about what Dad used to say about people from upstate and stuff, and I wonder what he would’ve thought about this crowd.

I eat good. The chow here is really good for the most part though everybody gripes about it all the time. I guess it’s something you’re supposed to do in the service. You can’t believe how important food is here. If Mom knew she certainly wouldn’t worry on that score. Guys’ll sit around and just talk about eating and never change the subject. Guys are always talking about how their mother made this or that, and everyone listens like their lives depend on it. Sebastian Piacenti, one of our waist gunners I told you about, has this knack for talking about his mother’s cooking so that the guys can almost smell it. He went on the other day in the jeeps after a mission about this veal dish with tomatoes that had the guys moaning and biting their hands.

Snowberry then attempted, with limited success, Bryant judged, to recapture some of Piacenti’s magic. He skipped ahead.

The guy who wrote to ask for the picture of Sis is Harold Bean. He’s got a girl here but I guess things aren’t going so well between them, and I was really talking Sis up in front of him one day, so I guess he was sold. He’s a nice guy, I think, though Lewis rides him pretty hard. Lewis says Bean raises a crew’s buggeration factor — that’s the phrase we got from the Brits for chances of something going wrong — but I think he’s just pretty much like the rest of us. Maybe more so. We don’t want to let each other down, and I think we do a pretty good job.

Lewis thinks Bean’s getting jumpy and says you mark his words, he’ll end up in a flak home, but I think it’s more this thing with the girl, and the rotten luck the squadron’s been having. I worry more about Piacenti. I don’t know that much more about Bean. He’s from Pennsylvania, but I think he told you that. He’s a good-hearted guy. He’s not a wolf. I think he looks fine but Lewis likes to say he’s got a face like an unmade bed. I think he looks like the little guy in Lost Horizons. You know the one I mean?

I’m okay. I think we’re all pretty blue like I said right now. I’ve heard some great new stuff from Der Bingle on the Armed Forces Network, and some new Vera Lynn stuff on the English stations. Tell Sis I’ve been working on the harmonies.

I find myself daydreaming more than I used to, and I have to watch it, or the guys’ll think I’m ready for the flak farm, too. I have these other dreams, too, though I don’t think they’re going to last forever. The guys call dreaming like that pulling a lot of night missions. I have this one where there are German fighters all around us and my turret mechanism is like it has sand in it or something, and the gun controls are all floppy and loose. It gets me in a real sweat.

It seems like what we were taught and everything isn’t good enough to handle everything

The entry stopped. Bryant closed the book and woke Snowberry, getting him to his feet and leading him gently to his bunk, as if putting to bed a sleepy child on Christmas Eve.

It seemed to them that it had been decided to keep them flying missions until they were dead. They were informed at the morning briefing that the target of the day would be Kassel, and a lieutenant known to most of them as a good man and a steady co-pilot stood up and said with frightening calm that he was no longer willing to fly these goddamn things, and that he wanted out. When he refused to sit down, he was escorted from the room.

On the hardstand Hirsch and Gabriel alone seemed capable of smooth movement, the rest of the crew drooped and jerked like marionettes waiting for their turn to board. Bean was learning German phrases from the little sheet in his escape kit: Danke, Bitte. Zug. Schnellzug. Dritte Klasse.

Snowberry was white. “I’m not gonna make it,” he whispered to Bryant. “We were so cocky before. Why were we so cocky before?”

Bryant understood, he thought: It was as if the present situation represented an invited retribution.

“This paper pusher I met in London told me, ‘You want to make breakfast, you gotta break some eggs,’” Lewis said. He was blowing on his gloves to further dry them out.

“That’s what they tell the eggs,” Willis Eddy said from within the plane.

Lewis shook his head with the expression of a man with insects on his face. “I clocked him. I got these little marks on my knuckles from his teeth. I hope he gums Farina the rest of his life.”

They were thirteenth off the runway, climbing into the lightening sky behind the banking silhouettes of the 17’s just ahead of them, and they rose east to the assembly points toward the brighter air. The contrails of the highest aircraft stood out in dark relief.

They flew to Kassel without the usual talk, the periodic oxygen checks the only communication. Most of the way, they had an escort of P-47’s with their reassuringly fat milk bottle fuselages, and the leading and trailing elements of the formation far from them attracted the German interceptors once the escorts had sheered off for lack of fuel.

Piacenti called fighters coming up from nine o’clock low and Bryant swung the turret around to catch a glimpse of four Messerschmitts with bright yellow noses pulling up close to one another and breaking formation at Paper Doll’s altitude, at the break curling back like the petals of a flower. They swooped out of range after some of the lower squadrons and stragglers.

He spun the turret to follow the action above and ahead and his vision shimmered, as though he had slugged a beer too quickly on a hot day. The diaphragm of his mask felt dank and cold. The bomb bay doors were grinding open and he could hear Eddy’s voice calling for steady but it wavered in volume. With concentration and detachment he seemed to understand what might have been happening, remembered a briefing: the A8B masks are prone to ice buildup in the exhalation bags, which unchecked leads to ice in the tube between the bag and diaphragm. He noticed below the fires of downed aircraft and bomb bursts as red peculiar blossoms, and moved to get a grip on his mask but felt like someone chest-deep in muck. Before his eyes colored electric bulbs blinked as sapphire, emerald, and ruby, and he felt his mind becoming luminous with dream; felt, like a drowsy child, ready to accept what needed accepting. He saw his drunk grandmother wandering around in his backyard dazed, impossibly holding a fifty-caliber Browning. With a sturdy and optimistic lack of resistance he slumped from the slung bicycle seat and tore the leg of his suit falling from the turret. He was dimly aware of the iron-cold slipstream blast on his calf. He remembered the creamy blandness of his mother’s egg salad, and was surprised to find his leg so tender, so sensitive.

He awoke to find Eddy and Bean working over him, transferring the portable oxygen bottles onto his mask, and he realized he was breathing through someone else’s as they did it. They were on their way home, Bean shouted to him. He nodded and waved. He had urinated in his suit and his thighs and rear were cold. The fuselage floor seemed to have the mealiness of wet sand, though he registered that was impossible.

He rode a long while with a kind of animal speechlessness. His mask again iced up and for a stretch Bean sat beside him and worked the only functioning mask on the buddy system, the two of them slumped together in their heavy flight suits as dull as drugged birds. He remembered frostbite and made an effort to move his fingers and toes. He had the weird sense the plane was no longer moving. He tried to keep awake but could not, and curled his toes within his boots as a last measure before passing out.

He was shuttled immediately to the station sick quarters and surrounded by frostbite cases. The sick quarters were four Nissen huts joined by enclosed hallways, discreetly removed by an aspen grove and a hillock from the barracks. He slept for sixteen hours and then sat up and gazed around him. The frostbite cases sat quietly, holding their affected areas like delicate and broken instruments. Their hands and feet changed as they watched absorbedly with apprehension edging on horror, from white and numb to red and swollen to something verging on black. A navigator a few bunks over lay as if dead with his head bandaged completely from the nose up. He’d been there three days and the men called him Claude Rains. Flak had blown out the perspex nose and his goggles had been smashed, Bryant’s neighbor told him. “The Doc said his eyes were frozen. Imagine?” The navigator was inert. A boy near the door was shaking uncontrollably. He had a blond cowlick that stuttered and waved like a signaling device.

Bryant was treated for anoxia and mild frostbite, his rear end alternately chilled and burning. It was still white but heading toward pink, his neighbor informed him with an air of certainty. It still burned enough to frighten Bryant, though as far as anyone could tell it was not swelling but recovering. The doctors credited some blankets Bean had stuffed under him.

He was released for dinner and found himself unwilling or unable to talk much with Snowberry or Lewis about what had happened. Lewis had been particularly interested since anoxia was his private phobia, but Bryant was less than specific about whatever early indications he might have noticed, and Lewis clearly decided to pursue the matter later. Bryant found Bean and Eddy and thanked them, but they looked away shyly and protested with shrugs that they found the thanks unnecessary and embarrassing.

He fell asleep quickly after dark and dreamed of swordlike night searchlights picking up a series of placidly floating barrage balloons. There was a wing from the biplane crash he’d witnessed as a child fluttering down like an enormous seed pod and swooping like a pendulum, and he was back in a nature camp he’d attended when he was eight, gazing at a sullen copperhead in a dismal cage.

He was led through a lean-to that molted into a kind of drainage tunnel, and became aware in the darkness ahead of an immense spider with a balloon-like abdomen and a palisade of curled black legs spiky with hairs that were distinct in the gloom. He was on his back and his breath came with his kicking and thrashing and the spider’s legs every so often palpated his with a terrible firm gentleness.

He woke to the sound of B-17’s returning from their assembly points, a long mission necessitating a pre-dawn start evidently having been scrubbed. There were noises and shiftings from most of the bunks. The planes were coming in at half-minute intervals and the lights reached and spanned, wavering through the windows and across the barracks, illuminating those who were awake and those who were asleep.

He got up, his mouth sour and dry. On his way to the latrine he stopped, and could make out in the darkness a boy in his underwear hunting for something in his barracks bag. When the lights crossed his face there was a look of pure apprehension, as if no activity could have been more illicit. Another boy near the door was chewing the corner of his sheet.

In the latrine he found a filmy glass and filled it and drank. The water was cold and when he looked at it, it was laced with blood, like colored smoke or underwater vegetation. In the mirror he could see that his gums were bleeding. The event seemed inexplicable. His teeth were reddening and he held the glass aloft as if he were offering a toast at a cannibal feast.

He retrieved his blanket from his bunk and stood outside, wrapped like an old Indian, bare feet cold on the dirt. Someone else was up as well, smoking just beyond the corner of the hut, but he didn’t care to find out who. He appreciated the blanket’s warmth and forgave its roughness and understood that his urges were being narrowed toward the primal: Safety. Food. Sleep. Farther behind, Robin or Lois. He stood in the damp early darkness waiting, the great colored chains of lights floating in. Below them the vermilion lights of the runway markers gleamed and receded. Behind him in the barracks he could hear as a background murmur the small shrieks and gabblings of battle dreams. Somebody in another hut altogether was playing a pitchpipe in sad and unrelated keys.

He walked a little further and climbed atop the hood of a fuel bowser. There were dull yellow lights on over the picket post, shuttered in a halfhearted blackout. He could make out ragged and gaunt dogs moving as shadows in and out of the illumination, starving, he knew, unsupported by base personnel, waiting for death. One nosed the ground and looked over at him, its tiny pink tongue in the distance visible in the light.

The beams ranging from the towers seemed to be pulling the big ships out of the night, and they dropped and banged like clumsy and lost buses onto the tarmac and swept past him, the turrets gleaming and illuminating shadows within, and then they were gone.