At the third session a fight broke out between a tail gunner and a dorsal gunner over the real Ju88’s — over who should have spotted them first — and the tail gunner, a medium-sized tech sergeant from Peoria named Theobald, knocked out a couple of the teeth of the dorsal gunner. The dorsal gunner had gone down on one knee beside Bryant and Lewis, cupping his mouth with trembling care, and when the lights had been switched on, Bryant had been arrested by the two teeth on his desk top like irregular pearls, dotted with jewel-like blood.
They snoozed through an early morning session on hygiene (“Hygiene,” Lewis exclaimed when he saw the topic posted. “Bean picks his nose and eats it”) and tried intermittently to concentrate on an afternoon marathon having to do with ditching in the water.
The first image which came up on the overhead projector once the room was darkened was that of an entire 17 crew minus pilot and co-pilot crammed into the radio compartment, body to body, in crash position. The presentation was clearly out of sequence, and the image faded from the screen.
“Fairies!” someone shouted triumphantly. The tail, ball, and waist gunners’ crash positions involved lying on their sides chest to back, nut to butt, as Lewis characterized so many military lines, and though the subjects’ arms remained primly at their sides, the crush did make things look comically intimate.
“Is that your hand?” someone else called.
The images reappeared, apparently now correctly ordered. The first sheet read: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A BOMBER IS FORCED DOWN AT SEA.
“Not a very military title,” Snowberry commented, next to Bryant.
They were comforted with the next sheet, a navigator turning rather quickly, Bryant thought, from his station, NAVIGATOR, it said, calculates estimated position, informs radio operator, destroys papers, picks up maps, compass, and celestial equipment, and goes aft to the radio compartment.
The image went dark again and the men groaned. The light came back on and a pair of small and flustered sergeants began working on the machine.
“Get the same guy who fixed the movie projector,” the earlier heckler called. The crews folded their arms and waited with a martyrish patience, griping about the constant snafus and trapped until the whole strip could be shown.
Bean and Snowberry argued about the Conn-Louis fight. Bean had admitted to everyone who would listen that he’d blown “over twenty dollars” on the fluke of Billy’s having “walked into that left in the thirteenth.”
“Two years and this geep is still moaning about it,” Snowberry groaned. “Bryant’s the mick. He’s the one should be yapping.”
“Conn won the fight,” Bean asserted. “He was ahead 7-4-1 on one card coming out for the thirteenth.”
“Yeah but he got knocked out,” Piacenti said. “Lights out. Capisce?”
“Nobody beats Joe Louis,” Snowberry said. “Joe Louis goes bear hunting with a switch.”
An image flashed before them of a bombardier taking aim at his bombsight with his pistol, like a cowboy ruefully dispatching his injured horse, and then it disappeared.
“Twenty dollars,” Bean said miserably. “I never bet money. It was a sure thing.”
“War,” Hirsch said, gazing at the huddled repair attempt going on around the machine, “has got to be one of the most boring of human activities.”
The strip resumed and they quieted down, becoming more than a little interested in ensuring that they knew the ways out of a sinking B-17.
At mess Bryant and Snowberry flanked Bean, and Piacenti sat opposite. “You remind me of Peter Lorre, Bean,” Snowberry said. “Except he has nicer eyes.”
“Why don’t you keep quiet?” Bean asked. “And then I could eat in peace. I’m tired of everyone always picking on me.”
“Cream chipped beef,” Piacenti said grimly. “Don’t you just love cream chipped beef? Me, I could eat it all the time.”
“Why isn’t the food as good as it was in Basic Training?” Snowberry asked. “Why is that?”
No one had any ideas.
“I don’t know,” Bean said, chewing. Every so often one of the beef strips didn’t give up so easily. “I didn’t really have Basic.”
“You didn’t have Basic?”
“No,” Bean said, a little cowed. “I got sent to the wrong post because of a typographical mistake. Me and about ninety other guys. The master sergeant didn’t know what to do with us, since we weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, so he had us on kitchen and latrine detail. We never got Basic, and I know I never complained. One day he took us out into the field and showed us his rifle.”
“Showed you his rifle,” Piacenti said.
“You know, the breech, and loading it, and shouldering it, and all that.”
“Are you telling us you only fired a rifle once?” Piacenti asked.
“Well, we didn’t get to fire it.” Bean took the beef from his mouth and laid it in a strip alongside others next to his plate. “Because then we would have had to use the range and he would have had to explain why and all that.”
“Oh, sure,” Snowberry said.
“Anyway, he put it on our record that we had Basic Training because of that, but I don’t think we did.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Snowberry agreed.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Lewis that story,” Bean said, after they had been silent a moment.
“You don’t have a thing to worry about there,” Bryant said.
On their leave, they hitched a ride with Army Supply as far as a sleepy crossroads Robin had stipulated and jumped down and gave the drivers the high sign. They stood awkwardly in the sun while the trucks labored and clamored down the curving lane like an embodiment of their own awkward intrusion into the countryside. They were both eager and happy, and took turns pushing each other out of the shade of a reedy beech tree. Snowberry compared the wonders of the upcoming trip to the World’s Fair, but Bryant did not carry the joke any farther. They had together that morning gone to the PX and asked the tech sergeant behind the barred window of the pharmacy for boxes of condoms. He had wished them happy flying.
“Aren’t you horny?” Snowberry asked. “I’m horny.”
Bryant blushed and let on as how this was all pretty old stuff as far as he was concerned. He fingered the package in his breast pocket, amazed that all of this was happening to him.
Snowberry pointed at Robin and Jean, pedaling toward them on ancient red bicycles and raising a low cloud of dust incongruous with their pace. “Here’s our World of Tomorrow,” Snowberry joked, and Bryant held up a hand in greeting, like a happy Indian, he thought.
It was the beginning of a forty-eight-hour pass. Snowberry and Bryant, thanks to the largesse of Robin Lea and her mother, Elizabeth, were going to enjoy what was for the aircrews one of the more coveted of the officially sanctioned activities: dinner at an English home. Dinner, short-rationed or not, in a setting in some way certain to relieve the sense of being in the service, and the war.
They hugged formally, the girls leaning forward with a cautious hand on their bicycles. Then they walked back the way the girls had come, slipping into single file when the occasional military transport passed. “Hubba! Hubba!” one dope called from the back of a Willys.