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 sergeant — Baird? — shouting 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 Stratton — did 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.