Authors: Jim Shepard
“The one thing I can't figure,” Bean said, “through all of this, is why Lewis signed up to go through it again. Even Lewis.”
Bryant thought about it. A jeep swept by, the mist soupy before its headlights. “He told me once he'd rather listen to us idiots talk about the war than the idiots back home,” he offered. “So I guess he wasn't happy there.” It sounded obvious and lame.
“One night he had this horrible dream,” Bean said. “You know, like Snowberry has. We were alone in the hut, sacked out early. I woke him up. I asked him then. He said, âHarold, it's a shithouse bind. You become a real American by fighting in another country.' Then he tried to go back to sleep.”
“What'd he say after that?” Bryant said. “Was that it?”
“I said, âSo then what?'” Bean continued. “And he said, âSo then you lose that America.'”
Bryant looked back over his shoulder at Lewis. He was a ghostly form in the fog, part of the equipment he leaned against.
“Gabriel's come out,” he said. “Something may be up.” He stood.
“Let me know,” Bean said. He continued to look off into the grayness. It was lightening, and closer to the ground visibility was better.
Back with the group Gabriel and Hirsch had more news. “It's postponed again,” Gabriel said. “But we're still on station.”
“What time is it?” Lewis asked.
“After six,” Hirsch said. He returned to the plane with Gabriel. Tuliese had come back and was poking distractedly at the number four engine from below.
Lewis resumed what he had evidently been talking about. “They want to pull off a big one. They need to pull off a big one. Put up or shut up time. I think it's like they been comparing the losses to the accomplishments and we're not doing so good. Maybe this whole idea of bombing during the day is hanging on this.”
“Maybe it should,” Snowberry said.
“Maybe. I myself think the RAF have got it knocked, going at night. Everyone bombs a field and comes home happy.”
“It's a helluva way to run a war, this daytime stuff,” Piacenti said. “Shoot your way in, shoot your way out.”
“That's the idea of the Fort to begin with.” Lewis tapped his head ironically. “All it is is a fat-assed bird with a lot of guns all over it. Put all the guns together. That's the idea. Who needs fighter help?”
“Yeah,” Snowberry said. “Who needs fighter help?”
“It's a shitty idea,” Lewis said. “But they want to make it work. Someone wants to make it work. You telling me they wouldn't have come up with a long-range fighter by now if they had wanted to?”
They thought glumly about the Air Corps' neglect on that score. Snowberry was wearing his World's Fair button.
“This is Charge of the Light Brigade stuff, is what this is,” Lewis added.
“Bean's doing German up there,” Snowberry said. “I can hear him.”
Lewis snorted. “At this point I just want to hit the ground alive. Let's start from there, and worry about
sprechen sie
later.”
Tuliese had a panel off and was fiddling. They listened to the
click-click-click
of his spanner wrench. “They should cancel,” Lewis said. “They have to cancel. The Regensburg people have to be running out of time. They have to get to Africa in daylight. I can't see how they can send us up in this. We haven't exactly lived and breathed instrument flying.”
Bryant reflected on the relative laxity of the base and Lewis's anger at their free time and the base CO, the car salesman from Pocatello. He understood this was what Lewis's anger had meant. They were not ready for this. He hoped the car salesman from Pocatello understood that and passed the information along. They sat, and waited. Ball finished the rest of his candy. Bean lay on his back under the nose like someone wishing to be run over. The darkness was completely gone now, and from moment to moment the clouds inched a little higher in an irritating meteorological tease.
There was another delay, to 0715. And then, while Bryant was urinating off behind some oil drums, Piacenti tapped his arm and told him of another delay, of nearly three and a half hours.
Lewis was aghast when he got back to the plane, and tried to get Gabriel to listen to him. “
Three and a half hours?
” he was saying. “What about the Regensburg force? They couldn't be waiting that long.”
“I don't know,” Gabriel finally snapped. “Who are you, Bomber Command? Maybe they are waiting. Maybe they're scrubbed and we're not.”
“Sir, isn't there someone we could ask?” Lewis pleaded. “Sir, do you under
stand?
If they went off, then the Germans can catch them and rearm and refuel for us. Sir,
they can go after us both
with everything they've got.”
“Peeters, shut up,” Gabriel said. “You're gonna have everybody shitting their pants before we even take off.”
Lewis stepped back and looked at him. “Yes sir, thank you sir,” he said. He sat down and put his hand in Bean's old vomit. “I'll have more faith in the Army, sir.”
Gabriel shook his head and walked away from him, standing with arms folded where Bean was lying. Bryant said to Lewis, “That's the worst possible case you're talking about. Things aren't that bad.”
“I'm beginning to catch on,” Lewis said. His eyes were glittering. “I'm the one who gets to figure this all out, and then no one gets to listen.”
They remained where they were. It was hot. Everything was ready and there was nothing to do. They hated the Army, hated the mission, hated the wait. At eleven o'clock Lewis announced they had now been up nearly ten fucking hours and they hadn't started the mission yet. They had been at the planes for almost six hours. No one around Bryant had spoken for two hours. Bryant was talking to himself in discrete little snippets of conversation. He had no idea how long he could wait like this, but he did know he was approaching some sort of limit.
The sky had cleared a good deal. They were perhaps waiting now for the more western bases to clear. No one mentioned the Regensburg force, and there were no official announcements on the subject. Most of their gear was strewn around them. A jeep arrived, and an officer climbed out and conferred off to the side with Gabriel. When they parted Gabriel, with a look of regret, waved them into the plane, and they stood and wrenched on their outer layers while the jeep tooled off. They climbed in in small groups, officers near the nose, gunners and radio operator through the waist. Bryant was the last aboard.
He sat on his sling and swayed like the boy on Snowberry's swing. The air was cooler. His neck prickled. The turret retained its factory smell of gasoline and leather and steel. It was too recently off the assembly line to have lost it, he understood, and it struck him how little time had been involved in all of thisâsign up, show up, train, arrive in England, end up here, doing this. He shook himself, frightened all over again. While the first B-17's of the flight line ran up their engines, turning over the huge Wright Cyclones with a roar, he ran through his training manual's profile of the perfect gunner, reciting silently from memory: the perfect aerial gunner, when he was six, his father gave him a .22 and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, he was ranging the hills and woods near his home potting squirrels until the pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, he got his first shotgun and went quail hunting, duck hunting, grouse hunting, and learned the principle of leading a moving target. He learned instinctively that you do not fire at a moving target, since it will no longer be where it was, but ahead of it, and learned too that his gun is a deadly weapon, to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Corps, he has a whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of the new weapon, and the principles of shooting down the enemy airplanes are exactly the same as those of shooting a duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner.
He closed his eyes. His throat seemed constricted and he wondered if he was getting the mumps. He visualized Messerschmitts as tow targets, Focke Wulfs as fragile and static ducks.
A bird stood on the canopy of the dorsal gunner in
No Way
, to his right, feathering wingtip feathers slightly in the gathering slipstream from the plane's engines. Bryant thought, This must be the way it is before a stupid attack, when you know it's going to fail and it can't help but fail but you can't change it or run away; you can only be a part of it, and help it to fail.
Over on
No Way
the dorsal gunner was rotating his turret and elevating his guns to dislodge the bird, which turned slowly and imperturbably with the rotating canopy, the black fifty-caliber barrels flanking it in a paradox of power and impotence.
No Way
went off ahead of them, the huge tail swinging around like a monstrous and slow weathervane. Bryant could see on the small blurred face of the tail gunner his irritation at the danger and probable stupidity of all this. He swiveled his guns at
Paper Doll
angrily, like the butt of a joke, a man in a tiny car fitted with towering and foolish fins.
Bryant watched them go off tail-heavy and wallowing, only slowly achieving any sort of grace, and then looked on blankly as his own ship began the rush forward. The end of the paved strip was happily vague in the fog but he could feel when they had been on earth too long, and started counting, and it seemed far too late when he felt the bump and lift and sway of
Paper Doll
finally letting go and straining upward. The wings tilted and wobbled under the weight and the trees marking the end of the base appeared and rolled by beneath, and that gave way to undifferentiated gray, and then they were climbing and banking to the right, although he couldn't be sure. No one spoke. All four engines sounded good. He watched for lights, for the black shapes of other Forts, though by then it would be too late. The engines' pitch seemed changed and enclosed, a roar in a bathtub. The gray began to thin and strand and suddenly they were out and into a brilliant blue, the sun flooding across his canopy and the ship's upper surfaces, and all around him was the awesome boys' war spectacle of the entire group's B-17's rising from the cloud blanket, like a horizon of magically appearing good guys, all sweeping into the clear and cold sunlight.
They were to form up as a squadron seven miles north of the field. The earliest planes to arrive began circling at an agreed-upon altitude and subsequent arrivals formed into their three-plane vees and slipped into place to join the slow wait. With the twelve-plane squadron finally assembled, they began climbing to the south to find the larger group. Hirsch announced they were eleven minutes late.
The larger group was not where it was supposed to be. Bryant circled his glass dome, scanning the blue and finding nothing. Gabriel asked Hirsch peevishly if
they
were where they were supposed to be, and Hirsch, though he wasn't lead navigator, confirmed it testily. After the pre-takeoff wait the delay was particularly irritating.
They crisscrossed a good bit of England searching. With every change of direction there were groans over the interphone. Willis Eddy every so often asked Hirsch to identify various towns. Hirsch pointed out Peterborough and Oxford, and then stopped answering. A pond or lake below was a luminous light blue. Bryant imagined Robin seeing these colors, and missed her. Eddy speculated on the interphone as to the identities of subsequent villages until Gabriel told him to pickle it, and Cooper asked for some semblance of interphone discipline.
With the rest of their squadron they circled, scanning the horizon for the larger group.
“What's a silage?” Willis Eddy asked. His voice in Bryant's ear suggested a casual curiosity that made Bryant wish Eddy would lose consciousness until the bomb run. He lifted his earpiece away and cleaned an ear with his little finger, his glove under his arm, and resettled the earpiece.
“A
what?
” Gabriel was saying.
“A silage,” Eddy said. The formation banked and they banked with it. The horizon lifted and swung and their starboard wing rose to the light. “S-I-L-A-G-E. Like on a farm.”
“Jesus Christ,” Gabriel said.
It's where they keep the animals at night,” Lewis called in. “What's going on up there?”
“I thought that was a barn,” Eddy murmured.
“Eddy, the next thing I hear out of you better have to do with the bomb run,” Gabriel said. “You keep interphone discipline like Gracie Allen.”
“Jeez Louise,” Eddy said. The interphone was silent.
No Way
was not far off their port wingtip. Their dorsal gunner rotated slowly, as if satisfying himself the bird was gone. Bryant remembered the potato farms in Barrington he'd been taken to see, a Fourth of July he'd spent in Tiverton, hot and dusty and enjoying a sticky strawberry soda while a parade went by. Small parade by Providence standards, with dogs sprinting along the route barking at the bands. A barnstormer had been promised in a local field and had indeed shown up, but had spent all of Bryant's visit tinkering with an engine that seemed disappointingly small and ill-kept.
Mother of Jesus
, the barnstormer kept saying in exasperation. Afterwards Bryant's father had sardonically commented on the miracle of the airplane, although his uncle Tom had been more enthusiastic later when Bryant had reported on the trip. The barnstormer's machine had resembled the biplane he'd seen disintegrate as a small child and he'd come away impressed with the flying machine as an amazingly complex assemblage of interdependent elements, all capable of failure. That any of them flew and returned their pilots to earth safely he found a notion to marvel at. He'd started studying engines not long after that. He hadn't been very goodâ“Just
watch,
” he remembered his father saying more than once, like Favale, like Tulieseâbut he had been dogged.