“I had a dog once,” Lewis remarked. “Looked a lot like Fido out there. We lost him on a trip to a combination car wash and country kitchen. I’m trying to teach Bean a little shooting,” he said, switching subjects without a pause. “In case he’s gotta fill in. He’s all right with a radio, I guess. But Ge-od, with anything else …” He shook his head. “If his IQ drops any more, we’ll be watering him.”
“You should stop riding everyone, Lewis,” Bryant said. “We’re doing all right.” But he was depressed and wasn’t sure he believed it.
“You guys,” Lewis said, “got the best substitute for nerve. Stupidity. Cooper,” he said. “Know how he got ready for this? Pulling trailers around Arizona, thirty-five dollars a shot. Ball used to catch rats in his family’s farm in Pennsylvania. His father gave him ten cents for every rat he got in the barn. Now he makes eighty-five a week and flight pay. You know? You guys can’t learn this stuff in five weeks.” He used the nail of his small finger to clean between his teeth. “You should’ve grown up with guns. Didn’t your father ever give you a.22? Didn’t you ever want to kill anything?”
“It was hard,” Bryant said, apologetic. “I lived in Providence.”
Lewis made a defeated gesture. “So, you know. There’s lots of things you could be doing. And they got you here doing this. With my ass depending on it.”
Audie trotted by and hunched to defecate, edging forward as she did so.
“Why’d you reenlist, Lewis?” Bryant said. He had asked before and Lewis had refused to answer.
“Flight pay.” Lewis rubbed his face. “Why else?”
“No, really. Why?”
“You got something better?” He guffawed. “The girls. I don’t know.” When Bryant didn’t look away, he continued irritably. “You ever check out the other services? Let me tell you something. I did. I transferred in. I was in the infantry. In the early days they said you could transfer into flight training, but I heard the physical for the Air Corps was a killer booger so I figured I’d flunk. ‘Eyes of an eagle,’ and all that. One day we went on maneuvers about twenty-five miles out into the scrub and it rained and then it was about 110. My shoulders, my crotch, my feet, everything was killing me. They started to show us how to disperse in the event of a strafing attack. And this plane flew over and made a couple of passes at us. And I thought, Well this guy didn’t get up at 0400, he didn’t march twenty-five miles, he’s not lying in this shit, and he’s gonna go back and have a nice lunch. Tonight he gets a pillow and the sack and I get the chiggers. That was the end of that.”
Bryant was silent, reflecting on his good fortune.
“Hey, we’re commuters. They live at the war. And who doesn’t want to be an American Eagle? You think Robin’d have the hots if you were some dogface GI?”
“But you reenlisted. You could’ve been an instructor,” Bryant said. But he couldn’t imagine that, either: he remembered Favale, alone on that baked range in the sun.
“Ah, I was staff sergeant. I would have outranked the guys who’d been there for months. That would have been a mess.”
“You could’ve gone home,” Bryant said.
“Home,” Lewis said. “Yeah.”
They were silent. Bulldozers labored and roared to push earth into the great hole in the far runway. Huge rolls of thick linked metal sheeting were stacked nearby, structural support for the concrete. “I want to do this,” Lewis said. “Half of everybody I know from my first tour is dead or missing. I want to kill some of their friends.”
He was angry. “I’m a wrecker. Think about it that way. My question always is, what’s its Fuck-Over Tolerance? How long does it have to be sprayed? How accurately? Does it come apart big or just drop like a dog in heat? I’m checking out everything. 109’s, 190’s. 110’s catch ’em right and the wings go like oak seeds. Coming back on the deck I’ll spritz a roadside shrine, or a barn. Sheep keel right over. Cows pop like mosquitoes.”
“They’re just helpless animals,” Bryant said. He wondered why he felt surprised.
Lewis looked at him appraisingly. “I don’t know what I expect,” he said unhappily. “Most of you gremlins don’t even shave.” He scrolled sweaty residue into visible dirt on his arm. “Look. I don’t know what other guys think, but for me what this is all about is precision. Get good at something. You get good, and you try not to go ass over flak happy. You come through for the nine guys you’re stuck with.”
He gaped to mock Bryant’s expression, and shook his head. “Guys in the 351st named one of their planes The Baby Train. I know what they were getting at, boy.”
“The way you talk it sounds like it’s every man or every crew for themselves,” Bryant said.
Lewis spat with a satisfying arc. “I don’t know anything about politics, if that’s where you’re heading.”
“We’re fighting because of what they’ve done to Europe,” Bryant said, a little shocked despite himself. “What they’ve done to everybody.”
“That’s good to know,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t help me shoot any straighter. It sure as shit hasn’t helped you.”
Bryant could see, over where Audie had been, Hirsch walking the hedge, hand in the green. “Everyone’s so mopey,” he said. “It’s pretty bad, morale.”
Lewis had stopped talking. Then he said, “I knew a guy in high school, used to play football, used to run back punts. Very good at it. I got a picture of him, once, doing it, and I remember his eyes. They were like silver dollars, seeing everything, guys all around him. You need that — super-vision, that nose for trouble. Sort of like wide-angle seeing. All the guys I know still around have that. Don’t worry about shooting. Worry about that. Just help us see.”
“I can do that,” Bryant said. “And shoot people down.”
Lewis nodded. He seemed to have given up. They listened to the rumble of the bomber streams returning from Kiel to the other bases, the bases without their devastated runway.
That night Bryant dreamed of his grandmother, an old Irish-woman who’d gone erratic from drink, and a mental condition the doctors weren’t able to diagnose. She kept flasks in with the linens, he remembered, and behind the big bags of dog food in the nether reaches of the pantry. Bryant and his little cousin had been staying over at her house in Woburn — Bryant was ten, nine? — and the door had flown open and she had stood before them blocking the light from the hall, an enormous silhouette. She held aloft what could have been a whisk. “Who’re you?” she’d demanded. “What’re you doing in my house?”
“We’re your grandchildren,” Bryant had said, in terror. His younger cousin had whimpered, either at the whisk or at not being recognized, and their grandmother had remained like that, a frightening dark shape, watching them as they lay still with their eyes and noses above the protecting line of the covers.
The dream stayed with him through the roust-up and he stood before the mirrors over a sink in the latrine frightened of his grandmother and half asleep. Beside him Lewis was shaving with special care, feeling his jawline continually, and smoothly reshaving areas that offered resistance. The aircrews had discovered that even slight beard growth caused the oxygen masks to leak around the edges. Snowberry was shaving as well, scuffing away unnecessarily at areas Lewis was fond of comparing to a baby’s ass.
Hirsch already had on a tie and an olive sweater against the chill and was filling his coverall pockets with pencils. It made sense to Bryant as he washed his face: he could imagine the terror of having to navigate home without a pencil. Hirsch patted each pocket, thigh, forearm, breast, and hip, and patted them again, absently. He carried his holstered pistol like a box of pastries.