It was hopeless.
My hands and feet were freezing, I found it difficult to breathe. My eyes, my head kept jerking around to every minute of the sky-clock (“Keep your head moving!” Lieutenant Di Angelo had shouted in Basic Flying at Gunter Field) and the headache was upon me full-blown, beating in my temples and at the base of my skull. Together, Ace and I managed to knock down two Focke-Wulfs, but the bomber was losing altitude steadily, dropping closer and closer to the ground, and there was almost nothing we could do to save her. The German fighters followed her down as we kept trying to drive them off, persistently closing in on her, and finally scoring direct hits on the navigator’s compartment and the cockpit. The big lumbering crippled airplane went into a slow flaming spin toward the ground, and the German pilots broke off contact at last, streaking for home, one of them having the audacity to waggle his wings at us when he left. We got out fast before the flak started again, and picked up the rest of the flight some fifty miles beyond the rally point. We did not see any other enemy fighters on the way home, but we ran into heavy flak over Hungary, losing two more bombers to a rocket battery, and picking up another straggler with her number one engine gone. At Trieste, which we could see clearly below us from 20,000 feet, I dropped down on her left wing and lifted my hand in the three-ring sign, letting the pilot know I was leaving him there, and he threw the sign back, and I veered away with Ace on my left, and called into my microphone, “Big Fence, this is Springcap Seven-Nine. Request a fix, over.”
“Big Fence reading Springcap Seven-Nine. Give me a long count, over.”
“Springcap calling Big Fence. Commencing long count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Over.”
“Springcap Seven-Nine, your position forty-five thirty-nine north, fourteen four east, approximately five miles cast of Trieste. Take heading one-six-six, you are approximately two hundred and sixty miles from base.”
We made it home in fifty minutes. As soon as I landed, I slid off the wing, opened my pants, and fired seven hours’ worth of piss at the runway while Sergeant Balson looked the other way and tried to pretend I wasn’t sending up a steaming stinking cloud to envelop his precious airplane.
We could not stop thinking about the bomber we had lost.
The pilot had been a guy named George Heffernan, a soft-spoken law student from Minnesota. We had often ribbed him about his gentle manner, telling him he would never win a court battle because he was not an aggressive type, this in spite of the fact that he had flown the lead bomber in a massive flight of five hundred bombers against the crude oil refinery at Floridsdorf on the fifth of November, and again on the eighteenth. Now, in December, a week before Christmas, flying for the first time after a long spell of bad weather, he had been shot down over Poland, and we had watched the spinning flaming airplane he and his crew had named
Mother’s Milk
explode on contact with the ground while the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs hovered.
We had also been informed by Archie Colombo in our tent (we still referred to it as a tent, even though the mason had finally finished our tufa-block house and we were living in unprecedented luxury that included a tank and heater built for us by one of the T-3s and fueled with 100-octane aviation gasoline) that a recent strike against Odertal had brought up two ME-262s, the dreaded twin-engine German jet. It was his opinion, an opinion shared by many of us in the Air Force, that if the Germans could produce enough of those airplanes, we would lose our air superiority and stand a good chance of losing the war as well. I had never seen the jet, but other pilots had related tales of it rising suddenly and frighteningly to attack at speeds better than five hundred miles an hour. Firing four cannons from its fuselage nose, the ME-262 could outclimb, outmaneuver, and outshoot any piston-driven airplane we possessed. Ace and I were not happy about Archie’s wide-eyed report, and we were even less happy about having seen Georgie Heffernan go down in flames over Poland. And since we were miserable, and tired, and perhaps a little scared, we drank a lot that night.
There was no shortage of scotch just then because the squadron had learned of a cache of Haig & Haig in Cairo, and had chinned in a small fortune to buy a full case in anticipation of our Christmas celebration. Tommy Rod win had been elected to fly the secret mission. In Cairo, they had tried to tuck the contraband into the gondola around him, but the cramped cockpit would not accommodate all twelve bottles. So Tommy had been forced to cache three of them in the left engine nacelle, and they got so damn hot on the return flight that they shattered. He had landed in Foggia in a heavy fog, the nacelle stinking of booze, and had almost been lynched by the rest of us because of the breakage. But there was still plenty of scotch around, and Ace tucked a full fifth into the waistband of his trousers before we grabbed a jeep and headed for Francesca’s place.
I don’t know how we got there alive; I don’t even remember who was doing the driving. It must have been a little past midnight when we drove into the courtyard and almost knocked over the fence penning in Gino’s single pig — a relative, we suspected. We reeled over to the darkened farmhouse and Ace threw open the door and yelled, “Frankie, where the fuck are you?” and then said, “Will, you see anybody?” and I said, “No, it’s dark in here,” and he said, “Of course, it’s dark in here, there’s no light in here,” and I yelled, “Frankie!” and Francesca came out of the bedroom pulling a woolen robe around her.
“It’s late,” she said.
“It’s fucking early,” Ace said.
“You flew,” Francesca said. It was not a question.
“Yes, we fucking flew,” Ace answered. We were still standing in the dark, the door closed behind us, the only illumination coming from the moon that glanced through the window at the far end of the room. “Put on some lights,” he said. “Isn’t there any electricity in this dump?”
“You know there is no electricity,” Francesca replied.
“I don’t know anything,” Ace answered. The kerosene lamp on the table sputtered and then flared. Yellow light spilled onto the stone floor in a wide flickering circle. “What’s
that?”
Ace asked. He was pointing to a flimsy structure at the far end of the room, shaped somewhat like a skeletal isosceles pyramid with four shelves. It was difficult to see anything too clearly in that dim corner, but the bottom shelf seemed to contain tiny figures representing the Holy Family, and the Three Kings, and a few shepherds and sheep and angels and what appeared to be a lopsided camel, all of them standing on a pile of straw Francesca had doubtlessly brought over from the barn. The other three shelves, spaced at intervals inside the open pyramid, each smaller than the next in ascending order toward the apex, were empty.
“
Il presepio,”
she explained.
“Tell her to talk English,” Ace said. “Talk English!” he shouted at her, before I could say a word.
“It is a custom,” she said, and shrugged. “For Christmas.”
“What’re the empty shelves for?”
“Gifts.”
“Don’t expect any from us,” Ace said.
“I was not expecting any from you.”
“Damn straight,” Ace said. “Where’s the glasses? I thought you were bringing glasses.”
“Coming,” Francesca said, and went barefoot to the wooden cabinet near the stove. “Was it bad?” she asked.
“It was marvelous,” Ace said. “Fucking marvelous.”
“We lost Georgie Heffernan,” I said.
“We lost some others, too.”
“Yes, but we
personally
lost poor Georgie.”
“So what? She doesn’t even know who poor Georgie is.”
“Was,” I said.
“Was. So what? Fuck him. Come on, Frankie, bring those glasses over here.”
“He’s upset,” she said to me.
“Who’s upset?” Ace said. “Here I am in lovely Italy a week before Christmas about to fuck a pig I wouldn’t look at back home, why should I be upset?”
“He didn’t mean that,” I said. “Come on, Ace, come on.”
“I
meant
it,” Ace said.
“He meant it,” Francesca said softly, and put three glasses on the table.
“Give her a drink,” Ace said.
“I don’t want anything,” she said. “I was sleeping when you came.”
“Give her a drink, Will. We sent a man all the way to Cairo for this scotch, you damn well
better
drink it. You better drink a whole lot of it, Frankie dear.”
“Have a drink, Frankie,” I said.
“All right, but just a little.”
“A
lot”
Ace said. Pouring, he mumbled, “Bet old
Skipper
ain’t fucking a pig like you, you can bet on that.”
“Tell him to stop,” Francesca said. “He doesn’t have to come here if he doesn’t want to. No one forces him to come here.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “Drink your fuckin’ whiskey, and shut up.”
“You too,” Francesca said, and angrily lifted her glass and threw off the three fingers of booze without stopping to take a breath. “More,” she said, and held the glass out.
“Thinks it grows on trees,” Ace said, but he poured the water tumbler half full again, and again Francesca drained it without batting an eyelash.
“Where’s the governor?” Ace asked. “Out with his prize pig?”
“Asleep,” Francesca said.
“He falls asleep quicker than most of us, you know,” Ace said.
“How come?” I asked.
“Only got one eye to close.”
“Ask me, he’s only got one
ball, "
I said.
“Just between you and me. Mac, you better have
three
of them,” Ace said, and burst out laughing, and then said, “You know that one, Will?”
“Yeah, I know that one.”
“This guy walks into a bar, and he says...”
“He
knows
the story,” Francesca said.
“So what?” I said. “If Ace feels like telling a little story, what’s wrong with him telling his little story? Did
you
fly to Poland today?”
“No,” Francesca said.
“So shut the fuck up, and let him tell his story. Go on, Ace, tell your story.”
“I forget the story.”
“It was about Georgie Heffernan,” I said.
“No, Georgie’s dead, the dumb bastard. Have another drink, Francesca.”
“I hate you both,” Francesca said, but she held out her glass.
“So hate us, who cares?” Ace said. “I’m going to bed.”
“So am I,” I said.
“Buona notte,”
Francesca said, making it sound like a curse, and not moving from the table.
Ace and I went into the bedroom. Gino was snoring away in his underwear. Ace pulled back the blankets and said,
"Out,
shit-head!” and the old man sat up and stared into the darkness with his one good eye, and then realized it was us, the liberating Americans, and immediately got out of bed, and shuffled and scraped his way out of the room. He said something briefly to Francesca outside, and then we heard the front door open and close, and we knew he was on his way to the barn. As we undressed, I could hear Francesca muttering to herself in Italian, the repeated click of the bottle’s lip against the rim of her glass, the sound of the whiskey being poured. Ace and I climbed into bed.
“Come
on,
pig!” he roared, but Francesca did not reply.
In a little while, we were both sound asleep.
Perhaps it happened because we were both so drunk. It happened many times afterward, however, when neither of us was drunk, so I can’t use that as an excuse. Perhaps it happened because we had seen Georgie Heffernan go down in flames. But we had seen bombers knocked down before, and our reactions were always the same, and they had never precipitated anything like this. Perhaps it happened because of Archie Colombo’s story about the jet, and the possibility that we might meet one on the raids to come and be defenseless against it.
Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had already flown thirty-two missions, with rest leaves to Rome after the twelfth, Capri after the twenty-fifth, and eighteen missions to go before we would be sent back home. Maybe after thirty-two missions with your hands and your feet freezing cold and your head pounding, you got too tired or too scared and just didn’t give a damn any more. Maybe you could only pretend for so long that everything was quite normal, thank you, and that escorting bombers over enemy targets was exactly what you’d be doing if asked to decide on any given day (“You anxious to get killed?” my father had said at the dinner table in our East Scott Street house on a day in March of 1943, when my mother was still alive and I was in a hurry to fly airplanes).
I heard someone weeping, and at first I thought Francesca had crawled into bed and was crying because of the way we’d talked to her earlier. I guess that was why I readied out, I’m sure that was the reason, thinking that Francesca was the person crying, and putting my arm over her shoulder next to mine, and then hearing Ace say, “Skipper, I’m afraid,” and knowing all at once it was not Francesca, knowing that Francesca was not lying between us, she had not come to bed. “I’m afraid,” Ace said, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” and I kept my arm over his trembling shoulder, and he moved his face in against my chest, his tears falling on my skin, and said, “I’m afraid, oh Jesus I’m afraid, Skipper,” and I said, “Come on, Ace, it’s okay, come on now.” He must have recognized then that I was not his older brother but only a friend named William Francis Tyler who had flown a harrowing mission with him that morning and afternoon, he must have realized then that we were not brothers. But he did not move away from me, he seemed to come closer instead, and I suddenly found both my arms around him, cradling him as though he were a baby, while he wept against my chest.
I’m certain it was Ace who started what happened next, but it doesn’t matter. It may very well have been me. I’m certain, though that his hand as he lay cradled in my arms accidentally brushed against me, and I’m equally certain that I was unaware of it at first. And then it happened again, and this time I felt the whisper of his fingers and this time I
knew
he had touched me, and I felt myself lengthening in response, felt quick creeping tendrils of excitement in my groin and along my cock, and was suddenly embarrassed. I think I wanted to move away from him, I think I wanted to call for Francesca, wanted her to bear the onslaught of whatever was beginning there in that pitch black room, but I could not turn away from Ace — he was my friend, he was crying bitterly, he was terrified. His hand tightened around my cock, he clung to my cock as if it were his own, as if by clutching the stiffening member between my legs he was reclaiming whatever maleness had been robbed from him in the sky over Poland that day. I moved my hand onto his groin. I reached in the darkness for him. To my surprise, I discovered that he was already hard, and I began crying too, inexplicably, uncontrollably. Sobbing together, we fitfully jerked each other into oblivious orgasm, and the next morning accompanied a thousand Fortresses and Liberators against transportation chokepoints in Hungary.