“Jerry Broben.” Broben leaned in and lowered his voice. “There an Indian word for your name?” he asked.
Proud Horse looked up at him and shrugged a shoulder. He really was a little guy, about as close to 4-F as you could get and still qualify. “My first name’s Martin, if that helps.”
“Martin?” Broben shook his head. “Never mind. This bunch’ll hand you a nickname in about two minutes anyways. Like it or not.”
“I’m used to that.”
“I guess so.”
“Hey, chief,” called Garrett. “They play ball out there on the reservation? You know, baseball?” He mimed swinging a bat.
“Some,” Martin admitted.
“Well, don’t worry, we’ll show ya. First we gotta get you a glove.” Garrett held up his own and flexed it. “See?”
“Mine’s back at—”
“Hey, Shorty!” Garrett called up. “Loan Geronimo here your glove, will you?”
Shorty pointed with his brush. “It’s by the wheel chock there.”
Garrett fetched the wellworn fielder’s glove and held it out to Martin. “Your hand goes in this end, chief.”
Martin put on the glove and stood looking at it. Captain Farley looked as if he were about to say something but changed his mind. Martin glanced at him, and Farley gave back a little smile and nodded. “Have fun, sergeant,” he said. “That’s an order.”
Martin saluted with the glove. “Yes, sir.”
Garrett jogged backward along the taxiway, away from the row of heavy bombers parked facing him. He nodded at Plavitz, and the navigator underhanded the baseball to Martin, who caught it in the trap and stood looking at Garrett.
The burly waist-gunner held his glove in front of his chest. “All right, Geronimo.” He punched the glove, then flapped it. “Put her anywhere around here, got it? Just pretend you’re throwing a tomahawk.”
Up on his ladder Shorty shook his head. Being the new guy was hard enough without being the new guy and an Indian.
He bent and mixed up more flesh pink and was just stretching up to start on the face when a loud pop! nearly startled him from the ladder. It had sounded like a rifle shot. Garrett yelled and Everett hooted. Shorty turned as quickly as he could high up on the ladder and saw Garrett wringing his hand like he was trying to flick off snot. His glove and the baseball lay in the grass beside him.
“God damn it,” said Garrett.
Everett put his hands on his knees and cackled. Wen laughed and slapped himself on the leg with his grimy cap. Broben grinned like someone had told a dirty joke, and even Boney smiled there behind his great stinking bulldog briar pipe as he sat in the shade of the wing. The captain folded his arms and tried to look above it all. He almost succeeded.
Martin remained in his follow-through, waiting to see what Garrett was going to do.
The big man turned his hand in front of his face as if puzzled that there was no blood. “I think you broke it,” he said. “Son of a bitch feels like wood.”
Martin straightened up and pointed to the trap on his glove. “It hurts less if you catch it here.”
“Screw you.”
“And the Proud Horse I rode in on,” Martin agreed.
Everybody laughed harder, and Broben applauded slowly.
“Sergeant Horse was a pitcher for the American Legion team in Rapid City,” said Farley.
“Post Twenty-Two, South Dakota state champs,” said Martin.
“This just keeps getting better,” said Broben. “You have a nickname when you played?”
Martin looked embarrassed. “They, uh, called me Red Man. Because I chewed tobacco.”
“Good thing he didn’t like Beechnut,” Shorty chimed in from on high.
Everett chortled. “Hear that, Gus? Geronimo here’s called Red Man.”
“I don’t give a shit if he’s called General Jesus Roosevelt,” said Garrett. “He nearly gimped my goddamn hand.”
“You do all your pulling with the other one anyway,” said Everett.
“Only when he sees an overstuffed couch,” added Plavitz. He drummed a rimshot on the hull.
Shorty turned back to the riveted metal looming above him. Any other day he’d be in the middle of the fun, cracking jokes and doing voices and pulling faces. But tomorrow the aluminum he was painting would carry him across the English Channel or the North Sea in subzero temperatures, possibly through storms and definitely through enemy territory. It was thinner than the steel of a beer can, and it was all the shield he’d have between himself and fighter planes and antiaircraft shells. That shield would bear his artwork, and it had to be right.
Shorty came off like a goofball, but he was dead serious about his work. He was barely aware of what he was doing as he dipped a trim brush, borrowed from Corporal Brinkman, into half a beer can and pulled on the soft slick bristle and finished up the figure’s face, adding shades and highlights.
Finally Shorty gathered up his paint cans and climbed carefully from the ladder. He set down the cans and moved the ladder aside and stepped back and looked up at her. Only dimly aware of his sore neck and aching back. The jibes and throws tossed all around him sounded underwater. There was just the parked bomber, angled as if already climbing in the air, the two small windows at the navigator’s station in the nose, the painted figure prone beneath. The setting sun cast magic-hour light across the airfield.
He became aware that someone was standing beside him and he glanced at the captain. Farley wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t frowning. Shorty couldn’t have said what the expression on his face was. Recognition, maybe. A man who saw some long-held notion given shape at last.
“Oh,” said Farley. “Oh, she—she’s fine, Shorty. Really fine. Just the way I pictured.” Reluctantly he looked away from the painting. “You’ve outdone yourself on this one.”
“Sir.” Shorty saluted.
Garrett’s wolf whistle broke the moment. “She can wave my wand any time she wants,” he said.
“A little respect, huh?” said Broben. “That’s a lady you’re talking about.”
The ten of them were gathered around the front of the bomber now. Captain, copilot, navigator, bombardier, flight engineer. Left and right waist gunners, tail gunner, belly gunner. And Shorty the radio operator, who glanced among their faces, looking for frowns, knitted brows, cocked heads. He didn’t find any. Even the new guy was looking on in open admiration, though he couldn’t have fully appreciated what he was seeing.
The painting on the nose of the Flying Fortress showed a sorceress. Not a witch, not a hag. A long, slim, pale-skinned woman in a skintight navy-blue leotard. Long black hair and pale green eyes. She was posed like the figurehead on an old sailing ship, or the hood ornament on a Cadillac. Nearly prone, back arched, one arm back and one outstretched and raven hair windswept. As if diving through the water or the air. Long pale legs, one bent at the knee. A gauzy blue cape flowed from her shoulders. A black wand in her outstretched hand pointed toward the .50-cal cheek gun emerging from a clear plexiglas window. She was long and angular and strong, joyous in her flight but determined in her attitude. Her face was stern and regal and refined. Not a grin but the ghost of a smile. Her clear-eyed gaze was fixed on something beyond the aircraft. Always looking ahead, always flying to meet it.
This was no Betty Grable in a bathing suit. No girlish Vargas pinup. This was a da Vinci angel ethereal in metal, a Waterhouse nymph resplendent in flight. Beautiful and refined, magical and eerie and not quite of this earth.
In the background floated isolated clouds. Some of them looked oddly solid, like granite, and at least one looked suspiciously like a medieval castle.
The lettering beneath the flying woman was shadowed script, almost a signature. Fata Morgana.