Authors: Jim Shepard
“Lewis borrowed Tuliese's jeep,” Snowberry commented. He was eating peanut brittle from his flight rations. “More ammo.”
The jeep roared up and jerked around with a rakish and dangerous tip. Lewis climbed out and started unloading boxes and loose belts of fifty-caliber ammunition.
“You're going to kill somebody driving like that,” Cooper called from somewhere off in the darkness.
“I'm paid to kill somebody,” Lewis said. The cooling jeep made ticking and shuddering sounds.
“Is all that authorized, Lewis?” Stormy said, and Lewis told him to have sex with his mother.
“Back there in the tail I just want me, my flak vest, the armor plate, and all these fifty-caliber gewgaws,” he said.
They helped him ferry awkward and spiraling belts into the tail, and coiled them into every conceivable space, in and out of the storage boxes. When they had finished, Lewis gave them each an extra belt for their stations.
“There's a reason you're not supposed to do this, you know,” Snowberry said. “The tail's gonna be so heavy we're gonna end up leaving you behind.”
“That's fine, too,” Lewis said. “One way or the other, I'll get by.” He called to Tuliese and flipped the jeep keys in the crew chief's general direction. They rang on the tarmac and Tuliese was left to hunt around in a crouch, moving in slow arcs like someone sweeping mines.
They waited in a small group, squatting and sitting. The B-17's around them were becoming clearer and the runways faintly luminous. Various figures moved about.
“I'm going to write a war book someday, I think,” Bryant said. He thought again of his high school English teacher with her sketches of the Parthenon, and her assessment of him. His holster rode up the small of his back. “Only in this one no one's going to get killed.”
Neither Lewis nor Snowberry chose to respond. Stormy wished them well and left. Cooper and Gabriel paced by, gazing worriedly down the runway.
Lewis shifted audibly on his pile of equipment. “You write a war book and no one gets killed,” he said. “I don't know what you got, but it isn't a war book.”
Snowberry sang disconnected bits of a Crosby song to himself, his voice too low to carry.
Piacenti was in the plane looking for something with a flashlight, like a prowler. He climbed out of the waist hatch and stood over them with his hands on his hips. “There're bugs or something in the waist,” he reported. Mist drifted from his words. “Hornets.”
“Hornets,” Lewis said. “In England.” He sounded profoundly unhappy.
“Tell Bean,” Snowberry said. “He's the bug man.”
“Check it out,” Bryant suggested softly. “See what they are.”
“Your ass,” Piacenti said. “I'm not going in there.” He blew on his hands.
Lewis said, “Isn't this something? We're ready to get killed, but not get stung by hornets.”
Hushed noises floating over from
I Should Care
sounded like someone straightening tool boxes, double-checking gear, doing something recommended and orderly and useful.
“My parents had this cabin once, on the Jersey shore,” Lewis said. Snowberry hummed softly. Bryant studied the morning light on the undersides of the clouds, annoyed with the prospect of a long story at this point and finding it difficult to listen. He was growing more convinced that a scrub was a near certainty.
“We used to run around over some back acres,” Lewis said, “us kids. Once, in the middle of these bushes, thick bushes, surrounded by trees, we found this '34 Nashâgreen with green upholsteryâjust sitting there, with no roads out and no roads in and no way on God's earth it could have gotten there. Perfect condition. There were leaves and stuff on it, of course. All the windows rolled up. Trees all around it, and these were big trees.”
It was clear enough now to make out the doors and Plexiglas canopies and turrets, and Willis Eddy in the bombardier's station up front sneezed violently.
“I'll tell you,” Lewis said. “No way of figuring it. We're being tested every day, boy.”
Piacenti snorted. “Somebody gonna do something about these things?” he asked. He was peering tentatively into the waist, his weight on his heels.
“Maybe it was a bootlegger's car, or something,” Snowberry suggested. It was the first indication he had been listening. “Some gangster left it there for the getaway. Al Capone.”
Why don't they cancel it if they're going to cancel it? Bryant thought. Instead of making us all sit around here like idiots.
“That's the thing; there wasn't anywhere to get,” Lewis said, standing and flexing a leg in front of him. “It was like the trees grew up after the car got there.”
He went in after the hornets, Piacenti following and Snowberry covering their rear. The plane was brightening and detail took on clarity. The fifteen-minute wait had long since passed. While they were inside the fuselage, shifting gear around in the search for the insects like someone rummaging through a closet, notification came to stand down, that the mission had been scrubbed. Bryant made futile and angry jerking motions with his hands down into the gravel and thought, How is Lewis going to get all that ammo back? He hated everything for being harder than it needed to be and sat with his legs spread before him like a child, winging loose gravel and small stones and whatever else his hands swept up from the tarmac at the gray space beneath the body of
Paper Doll.
Later in the afternoon the sun came out to mock the entire enterprise, giving the ruts everywhere beside the hardstands and around the base buildings a dusty instability. Snowberry found him beneath a tree, watching the smallish clouds of dust drift from trafficked areas in the distance.
“Tuliese is working on the ball,” Snowberry said. He had chocolate or dirt on his chin. “You wanna come look?”
Bryant got up, officially interested, as flight engineer, with all mechanical problems having to do with
Paper Doll.
They crossed long empty warm-up areas. Some of the crew of
Geezil II
were playing football with a rugby ball. Bryant could hear one staff sergeantâBaird?âshouting
Yah, yah, yah
as he sprinted wide to turn the corner. His duds were greasy and worn in the seat.
Tuliese was on one knee, leaning precariously beneath the ball turret, tools fanned out beside him in the shade of the fuselage. On the back of his fatigues he had stenciled
May Your Ass Never End Up on a Drumhead.
The clip and case ejector chutes for the turret were disassembled and curled neatly inside one another on the grass.
“It's the hydraulic line,” Tuliese said, instead of hello. “With this turret, it's always the hydraulic line.” He had hung rags of various sizes from the barrels of the machine guns. Bryant thought of the Italian clotheslines in North Providence.
Tuliese knew what he was doing, and their working relationship was such that Bryant was asked only to contribute his presence much of the time, to testify to the importance of what was going on. Snowberry, more in the dark than he was, and with more at stake in this case, this being his turret, poked closely at the nozzle assembly and offered odd and tangential suggestions. Tuliese accepted them the way he might have a child's, and Bryant recalled a
Saturday Evening Post
cover, a tow-headed boy offering incongruous tools to help with Dad's Hudson.
“I heard this horrible story from Billy Mitts,” Snowberry said. “Belly gunner in the 100th. You hear it?”
Bryant shook his head. There were a lot of ball turret stories going around.
“This guy was in a Liberator that went down short of the field in Long Strattonâdid one of those numbers through a thicket, ended up in big pieces all over some guy's estate. The belly gunner came out of it without a scratch.”
Bryant nodded. “That's a great story,” he said.
“Listen, listen,” Snowberry said. “This guy, he gets out, it turns out, he's the only one there. He's calling and calling, and crawls around the pieces, no bodies, no nothing. Turns out everybody bailed out. They gave the order and his interphone must've been shot out. He'd come all the way in and crashed alone.”
Tuliese snorted to indicate that the idea appealed to him. He was feeding a new length of flexible hydraulic line onto an accepting nozzle.
“I can't get over that,” Snowberry said. “It gives me the jeebies just thinking about it.”
“Listen,” Bryant said. “The word ever comes to jump, I'll make sure you're in the know. My mother's honor.”
“Just leave a note for him, Sarge,” Tuliese said. “Plane goes down, it's every man for himself.”
“Come on, Tuliese,” Bryant said. “He doesn't think it's funny.”
Tuliese looked at him without sympathy. Sweat stains under his arms connected at his sternum. Word was he hadn't changed his undershirt since landfall in England.
“Why not?” he said. “He thinks everything else is.”
Lewis and Snowberry enjoyed speculating on Tuliese's family's political orientation, as they did with Piacenti. Tuliese asserted that his family was American, having come over from Genoa years ago. Lewis and Snowberry called them the Black-shirts.
“Hey, come on,” Snowberry said. “Imagine coming in alone like that?”
“You think that's bad,” Tuliese said. “You oughta ask Peeters about that poor son of a bitch in
Cheyenne Lady.
Ott. Dick Ott.”
“Is this the guy in the tail?” Bryant asked. He hated when the conversations took this you-think-that's-bad direction.
“Ott? The wacko guy?” Snowberry asked.
Hydraulic fluid squirted from the line connection across Tuliese's arms. “This guy, don't ask me why he isn't off making pencils right now. He was on a ship called
Flying Bison
, they're not even over the Channel yet, barely at altitude, and something goes wrong with the oxygen to the waist gunner. He passes out. Pilot goes looking for air and drops them eight thousand feet but panics and pulls out too fast, and the control cables go, and then the whole starboard wing.”
Many of Tuliese's stories carried a cautionary component involving reckless pilots damaging well-maintained aircraft, with fatal and grotesque results.
“The wing root pulls the bomb bay doors off, they shear back through the fuselage, and tear off the tail. Ott's in it alone, ass over teakettle at twenty-four thousand feet. It's spinning like one of those seed pods gone nuts. The windows won't give and the centrifugal force is pinning him against the seat. He finally kicks his way around to face the opening and tries to squeeze by the seat assembly. And gets his shoulders caught on the armor plate.”
They sat rapt, listening to a story they'd heard before. The only sounds were those of Tuliese's tools.
“He must've been at a thousand feet he finally got clear, got his chute open, hit with a helluva crack, broke both legs. Rest of the plane came down in the same field, like a brick. Nobody else made it.”
“Lewis told me that story,” Bryant murmured.
“This guy is still flying.” Tuliese said it as though it had a terminal eloquence about the mental state of flyboys. “He screams at night and sometimes, a guy told me, they find him moving his bed so it's at a right angle to the other beds. Me, I'd think I was Napoleon at that point.”
He sat back on his haunches and farted with some finality, surveying the turret.
“Who told you that?” Snowberry said. “About the beds.”
“Guy who bunks with him. Same crew. Pissbag Martin.”
Snowberry and Bryant nodded, accepting the source. Martin had been named for his inability to control his bladder in combat. He was pretty well known, bladder aside, for being one of the calmest and more accurate gunners in the Group. Lewis had said, in their presence, “At least he
scares
'em every now and then.”
Tuliese repacked his tools and left without mentioning whether or not the turret was now fully operational. After he'd left, they sat with their backs to
Paper Doll
's tail wheel, the aileron over their heads an enormous low ceiling, like a boy's hideout.
“Did you know I hadda stretch myself to get into the Air Corps?” Snowberry asked.
Bryant looked at him. He'd swallowed some of Snowberry's stories before and had been made to look foolish, the slow kid who caught on last, or last before Bean. “What're you feeding me?” he said.
“No lie. They said I was too short. I rigged some cable between two poles and hung there, two full weeks, on and off. I had bags of sand on my feet.”
It was possible. Bryant couldn't read his expression. “Weren't you worried you'd stretch your arms?” he asked.
Snowberry nodded, ready for that. “I hoisted myself up and hung with the cable under my armpits,” he said.
Bryant said, “Are you going to tell me you think bags of sand made you taller?”
“All I know is, I'm in now,” Snowberry said comfortably. “And I wasn't before.”
Bryant thought, He's pulling my leg, and resented it. While Snowberry made contented squeaking noises with his cheek on his gum, he thought back to Gunnery Training, missing skeet, missing towed targets, missing first with the .22, then with the shotguns, then the thirty calibers, the fifties. He didn't fully remember how many of his test scores Favale had fudged for him. He thought about his position and the level of ability he had demonstrated and grew frightened and unhappy with his secret, sitting under the expanse of tail. He was both anxious and relieved that no one understood how poorly trained he was.
“It's a funny war,” Snowberry said.
Bryant thought he understood what Snowberry meant. He had tried to write to Lois about it, but didn't have the words to express his sense of the boredom and tension together, the unreality of the whole thing, and the fear.
“It seems like nothing's happening, you know?” Snowberry said. “And everything's happening.”